KALM JADD, ISLAMIZATION & THE WORLDVIEW OF ISLAM: OPERATIONALIZING THE NEO-GHAZLIAN, ATTASIAN VISION*

Adi Setia** ABSTRACT: The kalm jadd or new dialectics intellectual movement initiated by al-Ghazl and matured by Fakhr al-Dn al-Rz succeeded in putting all the hellenising philosophical and natural sciences firmly within the theological and epistemological ambit of tradition. This historical success provides pertinent lessons for Muslim scholars and intellectuals today to formulate what can be called kalm al-ar, or the Dialectics of the Age, in order to bring tradition to engage creatively and evaluatively with the challenge and allure of contemporary secularising sciences. KEYWORDS: Al-Ghazl, Fakhr al-Dn al-Rz, Al-Attas, Worldview of Islam, kalm jadd, kalm al-ar, Dewesternization, Islamization of Present-Day Knowledge Even as a discourse on religion, kalm obviously inclined, right from the start, to use forms of arguments some of which were clearly employed by ancient (and modern) philosophers; and it is of course important to identify these forms, their sources and characteristics.1

1. Preamble In Knowledge Triumphant, Franz Rosenthal observes that the Islamic civilisation is one that is essentially characterised by knowledge (ilm), for ilm is one of those concepts that have dominated Islam and given Muslim civilization its distinctive shape and complexion. 2 This should not be surprising since the divine revelation itself repeatedly emphasises that its signs or verses are only understandable for a people who think, (li qawmin yaqilna). 3 It exhorts believers, nay, even non-believers, to look to the cosmic horizons (al-fq) and into their very selves (al-anfus) for empirical/experiential evidences/indications/yt4 demonstrating the revealed truth (al-aqq).5 For many
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Revised and extended version of the original paper entitled The form and function of dialectical theology: the perpetual relevance of al-Ghazl, presented at the seminar Building on the Shoulders of Giants organised by the Glasgow-based Solas Foundation (http://www.solasfoundation.org.uk/) at the University of Glasgow on Tuesday 20 April 2010. My thanks to Shaykh Ruzwan Mohammed of the Solas Foundation for his kind invitation to me to speak at the seminar, and to my friend Dr. Sachi Arafat for facilitating the networking. This paper will also appear in the academic journal, Islam & Science (Summer 2012). Coordinator, Worldview of Islam Research Academy (WIRA), and Director, Titiwangsa Advisory Group (TAG); e-mail: adisetiawangsa@gmail.com. A. I. Sabra, The Simple Ontology of Kalm Atomism: An Outline, in Early Science and Medicine 14 (2009): 6878 (on p. 70). Knowledge Triumphant: The Concept of Knowledge in Medieval Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1970), 2. Al-Baqarah (2): 164. Most translations of Qurnic verses are based on Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Quran: Text and Explanatory Translation (Mecca: Muslim World League, 1977). For an elaboration of the term yat See Mohd Zaidi Ismail, The Cosmos as the created book and its implications for the orientation of science, Islam & Science 6, no. 1 (Summer,

scholars, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, the seeds of rational/cognitive thinking were already in early Islam, in the Qurnic revelation itself,6 or as Nuh Ha Mim Keller puts it, the Quran itself uses rational argument.7 From the very beginning, Muslims have taken a rational (or rather, intellectual and cognitive, aql) and scientific (ilm) approach to matters in both the religious (including, spiritual) and mundane domains (umr al-dn wa alduny).8 Simply put, there was never in Islamic intellectual historyIbn Rushd (520595/11261198) notwithstanding9the peculiarly medieval Christian and early modern problem of reconciling between reason and revelation as if the two were mutually exclusive avenues to truth and knowledge that have to be brought together in some form of uneasy compromise and co-existence. 10 As far as Muslims are concerned, revelation and reason are in mutual harmony as complementary avenues to objective knowledge that spring ultimately from the same transcendent, ontological source.11

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2008): 3153; and Annamaries Schimmel, Deciphering the Signs of God: A Phenomenological Approach to Islam (New York: SUNY, 1994). Fuilat (41): 53. For instance, Hans Daiber in his unpublished series of lectures entitled Islamic Philosophy: Innovation and Mediation between Greek and Medieval European Thought, delive red to his postgraduate students at ISTAC during the 20012002 academic year; see also his The Quran as Stimulus of Science in Early Islam, cited in What is the meaning of and to what end do we study the history of Islamic Philosophy?: The history of a neglected discipline, in his Bibliography of Islamic Philosophy, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 1: xxxi n. 127. Cf. J. van Ess, Early Development of Kalm, in G. H. A. Juynboll, ed., Studies on the First Century of Islamic Society (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 109 123 (on pp. 110ff.). Nuh Ha Mim Keller Kalam and Islam: Traditional Theology and the Future of Islam, in Islamica 13 (Summer 2005): 1527 (on p. 17); accessible also online http://www.livingislam.org/k/ki_e.html. See the important study by Al Sm al-Nashshr, Manhij al-Bath inda Mufakkir al-Islm wa Iktishf al-Nahj al-Ilm f al-lam al-Islm (Dr al-Nahdah al-Arabiyyah, 1984). My thanks to Shaykh Ruzwan Mohammed of the Solas Foundation of Glasgow for directing my attention to this book. See also Rosalind Ward Gywne, Logic, Rhetoric and Legal Reasoning in the Quran: Gods Arguments (London: Routledge, 2004). Ibn Rushd, Fal al-Maq f m bayna al-ikmah wa al-sharah min al-ittil, trans. George F. Hourani (Leiden: Brill, 1959). His tendency in that book to resolve this tension by subjugating revelation to reason is unacceptable to Orthodoxy, for divine revelation has higher ontological, and hence, epistemological, warrant than human reason. Etienne Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages (New York: Charles Scribners, 1966). It seems to me that, despite himself, Gilson (pp. 81ff.) is subscribing to a kind of Thomistic two-fold truth, viz., the truth of Revelation which can only be believed rather than known, and the truth of natural reason, which can only be known and hence not believed, and to him the two truths should not be mixed up or fused or integrated into a single Truth, for such integration is not possible, and that lack of integation is to him harmony! From the Islamic point of view, believing is not separate or distinct from knowing, hence awwal al-dn marifat Allh (the beginning of religion is the knowing of God), i.e., to believe in God is to know God. Ibrahim Kalin, Reason and Rationality in the Quran (Amman: The Royal Aal Al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, 2012).

This understanding is quite evident in Umar Najm al-Dn al-Nasafs (d. 537/1142) important epistemological preamble to his creed. 12 For the Muslim theologians, to whom belief (mn) must be grounded in true knowledge (ilm), the problem is merely that of specifying the precise relation between the two, which is that reason and all the rational sciences derived from it find its role, purpose and proper place (and hence its cognitive and axiological limits) within the enveloping context of experience, including the trans-empirical13 religious or spiritual experience of divine revelation, or Transcendence, and such was the position taken by the mutakallimn and the falsifah. They did not distinguish theology from philosophy,14 and neither did they distinguish it from physics or mathematics or medicine for that matter.15 Hence, al-Attas makes clear that: Islamic science and philosophy (i.e. ikmah as contrasted with falsafah) have always found coherent expression within a basic metaphysical structure formulated according to the tradition of Sufism and founded upon the authority of revelation, Tradition, sound reason, experience and intuition.16

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Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, The Oldest Known Malay Manuscript: A 16th Century Malay Translation of the Aqid of al-Nasaf (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1988), 152 passim. On the trans-empirical state of awareness, see Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, Prolegomena to the Metaphysics of Islam: An Exposition of the Fundamental Elements of the Worldview of Islam, 2d. ed. (Kuala Lumpur: ISTAC, 2001), 182183; cf. idem, The Positive Aspects of Taawwuf: Preliminary Thoughts on an Islamic Philosophy of Science (Kuala Lumpur: Islamic Academy of Science (ASASI), 1981), 9 10. See also Adi Setia, Philosophy of Science of Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas: An Extended Outline, Islam & Science (December, 2003): 165 214 (on pp. 1746). Cf. Nuh Ha Mim Keller, Sea Without Shore: A Manual of the Sufi Path (Amman: Sunna Books, 2011). Richard M. Frank, The Science of Kalm, in Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 2, no. 1 (March, 1992): 737 (on p. 19). For instance, they realised that acceptance of atomism entails rejection of Euclidean geometry and affirmation of discontinous or discrete geometry. Al-Kind himself was able to argue for cosmic finitude wholly along mathematical lines, as shown in Nicholas Heer and Haig Khatchadourian, Al-Kinds Epistle on the Finitude of the Universe, in Isis 56 (1965): 426 33. See also, Anton M. Heinen, Mutakallimn and Mathematic ians: Traces of a controversy with lasting consequences, in Der Islam 55 (1978): 5773; and George Saliba, The Asharites and the Science of the Stars, in R. G. Hovannisian and Georges Sabbagh, eds., Religion and Culture in Medieval Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 7992. See also Nahyan Fancy, Pulmonary Transit and Bodily Resurrection: The Interaction of Medicine, Philosophy and Religion in the Works of Ibn al-Nafs (d. 1288) (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2006); and Robert Morrison, Falsafa and Astronomy after Avicenna: An Evolving Relationship, in Y. Tzvi Langermann, ed., Avicenna and His Legacy: a Golden Age of Science and Philosophy (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009), 307 326. Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, A Commentary on the ujjat al-Siddq of Nr al-Dn al-Rnr (Kuala Lumpur: Ministry of Culture), 464 465; Adi Setia, Philosophy of Science, 171. See also the recent book by Ibrahim Kalin, Reason & Rationality in the Quran (Amman: Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, 2012), in three languages, English, French and Arabic, and downloadable from http://www.rissc.jo/campaigns/120523-4-New-Books.html.

Their underlying epistemic point of departure is that true belief cannot be simply willed into the heart,17 for it has objective cognitive content that must be known or understood, and even experienced,18 in order to be properly affirmed (tadq). Moreover, that content can be demonstrable in various ways, and thus, communicated, shared, debated and rationalised. 19 In short, it was clearly understood and accepted that belief or faith is not something you can simply shove down peoples throats or wishy-washily wished into being out of thin air. As Keller puts it: Indeed, Islam is a sapiential religion, in which salvation itself rests not on vicarious atonement as in Christianity, or on ethnic origin as in Judaism, but on personal knowledge. Whoever knows that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is the Messenger of God is by that very fact saved.20 2. The Islamic Scientific Endeavour The scientific endeavour (in the sense of systematic intellectual inquiry) in Islamic history began with the textual standardisation of the Qurn, and with the systematic transmission, collection and authentication of the Sunnah. 21 These budding endeavours in systematic intellectual work soon inspired the cultivation of sophisticated linguistic sciences (etymology, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, lexicography, prosody, metrics, rhetoric and tajwd = art of Qurnic recitation) which emphasised the precise relations between words and their meanings.22 On these elaborate linguistic foundations, the science of jurisprudence (fiqh) was rigorously developed with its own internal analogical principles ( qiys) or comparative-deductive 23 method of juristic inference that facilitated the creative application of the normative injunctions of the Qur n and Sunnah to the
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As William James would have it in his essay The Will to Believe, in William James, The Will to Believe and other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Dover, 1956). See the nice discussion in Hamza Yusuf, trans. The Creed of Imam al-aw (Zaytuna Institute, 2007), 1314. Thus, for instance, the position of Ibn al-Nafs; see Nahyan Fancy, The Virtous Son of the Rational: A Traditionalists Response to the Falsifa, in Langermann, Avicenna and His Legacy, 219248. Keller, Kalam and Islam, 26 (italics mine). M. M. Am, Studies in Early adth Literature with a Critical Edition of Some Early Texts , reprint edition (Kuala Lumpur: IBT, 2009); Eerik Dickinson, The Development of Early Sunnite Hadith Criticism: The Taqdima of Ibn Ab atim al-Rz (240/854327/938) (Leiden: Brill, 2001); Harald Motzki, The Origins of Islamic Jurisprudence: Meccan Fiqh before the Classical Schools (Leiden: Brill, 2002); Scott C. Lucas, Constructive Critics, adth Literature, and the Articulation of Sunni Islam: The Legacy of the Generation of Ibn Sad, Ibn Man and Ibn anbal (Leiden: Brill, 2004). See also Gregor Schoeler, The Oral and the Written in Early Islam, trans. Uwe Vegelpohl, ed., James Montgomery (London: Routledge, 2006) and its review by Gibril Fouad Haddad in The Muslim World Book Review 27 no. 4 (summer 2007), 2429. G. Bohas, Jean-Patrick Guillaume and D. E. Kouloughli, The Arabic Linguistic Tradition (London: Routledge, 1990). Hans Daibers term, unpublished academic course lectures delivered at ISTAC during the academic year 20012002.

particular local and temporal contexts of diverse Muslim communities. This cultivation of linguistic definition24 and rational argumentation in the context of religious, intellectual (viz., the translation movement) and political discourse (viz., administrative imperatives of government) prepared the minds of Muslim scholars for their eventual creative engagement with the attractions and challenges of the rich intellectual and scientific cultures of the ancient Egyptians, Chinese, Greeks, Persians and Indians which they encountered in the newlyacquired and far-flung territories beyond the immediate boundaries of the Arabian peninsula. The Muslims were most attracted to Greek philosophical, logical, medical, mathematical, scientific and ethical principles, and studied them very thoroughly, critically and self-consciously indeed.25 By the time of the Caliph al-Mamn (10th century CE), a cross-cultural26 intellectual movement for translating these Greek works into Arabic was in full swing with the active support of the state and affluent, well-connected individuals. While rejecting some of those Greek principles, Muslim scholars readily recognised many others that were clearly in general accord with the Qurnic injunction of grounding knowledge, belief and practice in objective rational thinking and empirical experience. Clearly, this critcal, self-conscious appropriation of these ancient sciences (al-ulm al-awil) was motivated and framed both by the cognitive and pragmatic needs of the new, expanding empire and by the intrinsic intellectual allure and challenge of the new, foreign system of knowledge.27 But long before the attractions of Greek rational thought had taken root, the initially dormant discursive and argumentative acumen of Muslims had already been activated and honed by external theological debates with the Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and Zoroastrians 28 as well as by intra-Muslim political, theological and juristic controversies which resulted in the rise of distinct, contending doctrinal sects (firaq),29 and schools of thought (madhhib) in theological, philosophical, scientific and legal matters.30
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Roshdi Rashed once said, If the writings of these two [principal] civilizations [Hellenistic and Persian] and the information they had acquired were to be understood and, therefore, expressed in Arabic, the first task was to translate them and, consequently, to make Arabic, which was a language of the desert, a language of science. See his public lecture organised by UNESCO, Islam and the flowering of the exact sciences, in Islam, philosophy and science (Paris: UNESCO Press, 1981), 133 67 (on p. 133). George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 172 passim. Ibid., 1130 passim. See also the interesting discussion in Roshdi Rashed, Greek into Arabic: Transmission and Translation, in James E. Montgomery, ed., Arabic Theology, Arabic Philosophy, from the Many to the One: Essays in Celebration of Richard M. Frank (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 2006), 157198. Ibid.; see also Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early Abbasid (London: Routledge, 1998). See, for instance, Mustafa Ceric, The Roots of Synthetic Theology in Islm: A Study of the Theology of Ab Mansr al-Mturd (Kuala Lumpur: ISTAC, 1995). Abd al-Qahir ibn Tahir ibn Muhammad Abi Mansur al-Baghdadi (1037/429), al-Farq bayn alFiraq (Beirut: Dr al-Marif, 2001). Concerning these extra- and intra-communal politico-theological controversies, see respectively Daniel J. Sahas, John of Damascus on Islam: The Heresy of the Ishmaelites (Leiden:

Indeed, there were heated controversies amongst these opposing schools of thought as to the extent to which these Greek philosophico-scientific sciences were or were not in accord with the worldview of Islam projected into the minds of Muslims through their reading and understanding of the Qurn.31 On the one hand, stood the Muslim philosophers (falsifah/ukam), for example, al-Kind (d. 866), al-Frb (d. 950), Ibn Sn (d. 1037) and Ibn Rushd who, on the whole, could be said to be more receptive than critical of the Greek speculative sciences. On the other hand, stood the Asharite rationalist theologians (mutakallimn) such as al-Ashar (d. 935), al-Bqilln (d. 1013), al-Juwayn (d. 1085), 32 alGhazl (d. 1111), Fakhr al-Dn al-Rz (d. 1209) and al-Bayw (ca. 12251316 CE) who could be said to be more critical than receptive to Greek rationality. Moreover, both camps were at the same time in heated engagement with the (more conservative) anbalites, Mutazilites and Shites.33 Even amongst the philosophers, Frbian-Avicennan Aristotelianism was not received uncritically. A particular case in point is Ab al-Barakt alBaghdds (d. 1164) remarkable Kitb al-Mutabar34 which criticised Aristotelian physics and metaphysics just as al-Ghazl had previously done so in his celebrated Tahfut al-Falsifah, and which prefigured much of the Fakhrur zian wide-ranging polemics against peripateticism in general. Later on, even the socalled anti-rationalist Ibn Taymiyyah (12631328 CE) could not help but be appreciative of the al-Mutabar and its author and of Ibn Rushd himself while being rather critical of both Ibn Sn and al-Fakhr al-Rz.35 In other words, to
Brill, 1972); and Josef van Ess, Umar II and His Epistle against the Qadariyya, in AbrNahrain XII (1971-72): 1926. A survey in this regard is W. Montgomery Watt, The Formative Period of Islamic Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1973). On the concept Worldview of Islam see al -Attas, Prolegomena, especially his forty-page Introduction, viz. (paraphrased from pp. 1 5), The worldview of Islam is the vision of reality and truth that reveals to the Muslim mind what existence is all about. It is a metaphysical survey of the visible as well as the invisible worlds, including the perspective of life as a whole. In this holistic perspective of life, the dunya-aspect of life is thoroughly integrated into the akhirah-aspect of life, and in which the akhirah-aspect of life has ultimate and final significance. On al-Juwayn, see the useful introduction by Paul E. Walker, trans ., A Guide to Conclusive Proofs for the Principles of Belief: Kitb al-Irshd il Qawi al-Adilla f Ul al-Itiqd (Reading: Garnet, 2000), xixxxxvii. See, for instance, the useful survey by Shlomo Pines, Islamic Philosophy, in The Collected Works of Shlomo Pines, vol. III, Studies in the History of Arabic Philosophy, ed. Sarah Stroumsa (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1996); and Richard M. Frank, Philosophy, Theology and Mysticism in Medieval Islam: Texts and Studies on the Development and History of Kalam , 2 vols. (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 20052007). Kitb al-Mutabar, 3 vols. in 1 book (Hyderabad: 1357H). A monograph on his metaphysics is Jaml Rajab Sdab, Ab al-Barakt al-Baghdd wa Falsafatuhu al-Ilhiyyah: Dirsah li Mawqifihi al-Naqd min Falsafat Ibn Sn (Cairo: Maktabah Wahbah,1996). See Sulaymn al-Nadws informative introduction to the Kitb al-Mutabar, 3 vols. in 1 (Hyderabad: 1357H), 3: 230252. Ibn Taymiyyahs philosophical acumen is remarkably borne out in some recent meticulous studies, such as the two-part study by Yahya J. Michot, A Mamlk Theologians Commentary on Avicennas Risla Aawiyya, being a translation of a part of the Dar al-Taarru of Ibn Taymiyya, with introduction, annotation, and appendices, Journal of Islamic Studies 14, no. 2 (2003): 149203, and Journal of Islamic Studies 14, no. 3 (2003): 309363; and Jon Hoover, Perpetual Creativity in the Perfection of God:

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effectively attack the philosophers and the logiciansand this means engaging them on their own grounds, and bringing the battle to their turf, as it were Ibn Taymiyyah was compelled to be superlative in philosophical and logical reasoning himself; there was simply no two ways to go about it. Ironically, even surprisingly, the perceived intellectual threat of Hellenistic thought, particularly Aristotelianism in its Neoplatonic garb, 36 was in the end overcome by a gradual, self-conscious, and self-confident process of cooption of it into the orthodox Islamic theological framework on the part of post-Ghazlan mutakallimn. In this process, the Greek sciences were actively appropriated and naturalised to such an extent that Ibn Khaldn in the 15th century was drawn to observe that one could no longer differentiate between kalm and falsafah so much have the two been fused together.37 It may be surmised that the eventual triumph of Ash arism (including Mturdism and ahwism, 38 or Sunnism in general), was due to its creative intellectual versatility in co-opting or appropriating the rationalism of the Mutazilites and the falsifah and the traditionalism of the anbalites into its own synthetic theological framework, 39 which gave both naql and aql their due, and took a middle course between the doctrines of the opposing sects.40 It can be seen that this middle course was not a neutral uncommitted course but a critically integrative one which gives each view and each school its proper place in relation to other contending views and schools within what may be referred to as a hierarchic onto-epistemic scale of truth-reality in which Kalm theology was harmonised with and integrated into f metaphysics and ontology.41
Ibn Taymiyyas Hadith Commentary on Gods Creation of this World, in Journal of Islamic Studies 15, no. 3 (2004): 287329. Parviz Morewedge, ed., Neoplatonism in Islam (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1992). Ibn Khaldn, Muqaddimah, trans. Franz Rosenthal, 3 vols. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958), 3: 5253; cf. A. I. Sabra, The Appropriation and Subsequent Naturalization o f Greek Science in Medieval Islam: A Preliminary Statement, in History of Science 27 (1987): 22343; see also Ayman Shihadeh, From al-Ghazl to al-Rz: 6th/12th Century Developments in Muslim Philosophical Theology, in Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 15 (2005): 141179. A recent translation of al-aws (d. 321/933) creedal statement is Hamza Yusuf, trans. The Creed of Imam al-aw (Zaytuna Institute, 2007). On this synthetic (i.e., synthesizing) theological framework, see Mustafa Ceric, Roots of Synthetic Theology in Islam: A Study of the Theology of Ab Manr al-Mturd (Kuala Lumpur: ISTAC, 1995). Al-Mturd, Kitb al-Tawd, ed. and intro. Fathalla Kholeif (Beirut: Dar al-Machreq, 1982), xiii. Al-Attas, Prolegomena, 177332 passim; idem, A Commentary on the ujjat al-iddq of Nr al-Dn al-Rnr (Kuala Lumpur: Ministry of Culture, 1986); Syed Naguib al-Attas, Some Aspects of Sufism as understood and practiced among the Malays (Singapore: Malaysian Sociological Research Institute, 1963), 120 passim; Nr al-Dn Abd al-Ramn ibn Amad al-Jm, al-Durrah alFkhirah f Taqq Madhhab al-fiyyah wa al-Mutakallimn wa al-ukam al-Mutaqaddimn, trans. Nicholas Heer as The Precious Pearl (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1979). See also the nuanced, comprehensive discussions by Ayman Shihadeh in Ayman Shihadeh, ed., Sufism and Theology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 1 14; and Toby Mayer, Theology and Sufism, in Tim Winter, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Classical Islamic Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 258 287. See also the yet-to-be-published doctoral study by Zaidi Ismail, Existence (al-Wujd) and Its Relation to Quiddity (al-Mhiyyah) in the later Asharite Kalm, with Special Reference to Aud al-Dn al-js al-Mawqif and al-Sayyid al-

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Not only kalm and falsafah was fused together in this long process of intellectual appropriation and naturalisation (or even Islamization in the Attasian sense of the term),42 but that all the four main mutually autonomous intellectual systems, namely, kalm, falsafah, fiqh and usul al-fiqh43 and taawwuf44 were fused together into a single, enlarged more encompassing and selfconsciously integrative Orthodoxy, which thereby thoroughly embeds all the intellectual or discursive sciences (aqliyyt) into the firm ambit of divine revelation and prophetic tradition (naqliyyt/samiyyt). That was the singular achievement of al-Ghazls monumental Iy Ulm al-Dn (The Revivification of the Sciences of Religion), and eventually the whole Muslim world would come to endorse whole-heartedly that grand synthesis and proclaim him ujjat alIslm, The Proof of Islam. In the Iy, the intellectual was delicately and elegantly fused with, or rather, into the religious and the spiritual, so much so that the intellectual man and the religious, spiritual man became one and the same man or woman;45 at least, that was the case for centuries in the Islamic world before the relatively recent onslaught of secularisation brought on by colonisation and westernisation which systematically banished all people of religious vision from having any meaningful, directive role in the realm of the mundane and the worldly and the discourse pertaining to it. 3. Al-Ghazl and the New Kalm (Kalm Jadd ) Instead of impeding philosophico-scientific thought in Islam, al-Ghazls Tahfut al-Falsifah, by the intense positive and negative responses it provoked amongst scientists and philosophers through subsequent centuries, actually did much to hasten this process of critical, self-conscious deconstruction, reconstruction, synthesis and naturalisation. In relation to the new kalams engagement with astrology and astronomy, for instance, George Saliba says that: It forced the scientists to redefine their disciplines and to attempt to achieve the consistency that they perceived to have been lacking

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Sharf Ali al-Jurjns Shar al-Mawqif, (Kuala Lumpur: ISTAC, 2004), especially pp. 236 237. On the definition of Islamisation, see Syed Muhammad Naquib al -Attas, Islam and Secularism (Kuala Lumpur: ISTAC, 1993), 4445. Wan Azhar Wan Ahmad, The Place of Reason vis -a-vis Revelation in Imm al-aramayn alJuwayns Legal Theory: A Symbiosis between His Kalm and Ul al-Fiqh. Ph.D. diss., International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization (ISTAC), International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM), 2006. See also Umar F. Abd-Allah, Theological Dimensions of Islamic Law, in Tim Winter, The Cambridge Companion to Islamic Theology, 237257. That is, taawwuf in its metaphysical, cognitive or mukshafah or gnostic mode, i.e., in the form of metaphysical Sufism, in contrast to its more popular and accessible ethical, practical or mumalah or pragmatic mode. As in the remarkable case of Ibn al-Nafs; see Nahyan Fancy, The Virtous Son, 219248. See also Gerhard Endress, Reading Avicenna in the Madrasa, in James E. Montgomery, ed., Arabic Theology, Arabic Philosophy, from the Many to the One: Essays in Celebration of Richard M. Frank (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 2006), 371 424.

in the Greek legacy. That new reconstruction had very positive effects on the making of what later became a truly Islamic science.46 The Tahfut marked the rise of the new philosophical kalm (kalm jadd) which was characterised by an aggressive, self-confident, thoroughgoing polemic against Avicennian falsafah on the latters own conceptual, methodological, analytical and logical terms, a polemic which ended with the former taking over as its own much of the ground covered by the latter. 47 By the time al-Ghazl passed away, logic (maniq) was naturalised as a conceptual tool for kalm and fiqh. Moreover, by the time of al-Rz and his successors, logic was well on its way to becoming a self-contained Islamic discipline in its own right,48 while the subject matter of falsafah was as a whole thoroughly integrated into the new kalm. As Elder puts it, New proofs were forthcoming which made use of the physics, metaphysics and mathematics of the philosophers. 49 Similarly, Nicholas Heer says: In the wake of al-Ghazzl there eventually came to be an increasingly close bond between logic and theological study. The theologian must be able to assess the weight of contending views, distinguish the demonstrative (a) from the dialectic (jadal), the merely persuasive (iqn), the sophistic (mughla), and the poetic (shir). Thus logic increasingly came to be accepted as an essential instrument for theology as well as other branches of knowledge.50 In recognition of the pivotal roles of al-Ghazl and al-Rz in the rise and establishment of the new kalm, Ibn Khaldn says: The first (scholar) to write in accordance with the (new) theological approach was al-Ghazl. He was followed by the Imm ibn al-Khab [i.e., Fakhr al-Dn al-Rz]. A large number of scholars followed in their steps and adhered to their tradition. 51
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George Saliba, The Asharites and the science of the stars, in Richard G. Hovannisian and George Sabagh, eds., Religion and Culture in Medieval Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 7992, on 90. For an interesting, nuanced discussion comparing the contending views of Hoodbhoy and Saliba, see Arun Bala, Did Medieval Islamic Theology Subvert Science?, in George Gheverghese Joseph and Burjor Avari, Knowledge and Cultures: Crossing Boundaries in History (Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University, 2009). Al-Ghazl, The Incoherence of the Philosophers, trans. Michael Marmura (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 2000), xvxvi; Binyamin Abrahamov, Ibn Sns Influence on al Ghazls Non-Philosophical Works, in Abr-Nahrain, vol. XXIX (1991), 117; Jules Janssens, Al-Ghazzls Tahfut: Is It Really a Rejection of Ibn Sns Philosophy?, in Journal of Islamic Studies, 12:1 (2001), 117. Nicholas Rescher, The Development of Arabic Logic (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1964), 5154, and 57ff. See also, Farid Shahran, Fakhr al -Dn al-Rzs Logic: An Edition of his Mulakhkha f al-ikmah wa al-Maniq (Section on Taawwurt and al-add), M.A. Thesis (Kuala Lumpur: ISTAC, 1999), 122. Earl Edgar Elder, trans., A Commentary on the Creed of Islam: Sad al-Dn al-Taftzn on the Creed of Najm al-Dn al-Nasaf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950), xvi. Nicholas Rescher, Development of Arabic Logic, 51. See also his Studies in the History of Arabic Logic (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963). Ibn Khaldn, Muqaddimah, 3: 43.

Eventually, through the intellectual example and influence of al-Ghazl, and then al-Rz, the original threatening Hellenistic background faded into oblivion and falsafah was gradually Islamised until it became totally transformed into a naturalised Islamic science in the form of ikmah ishrqiyyah (which can be read as metaphysical Sufism/mysticism) at the hands of al-Suhraward (549 587/11541191) and his successors, 52 and in the form of maniq and philosophical kalm at the hands of al-Rz and his successors from Sayf al-Dn almid53 (d. 551631/11561234) to al-Bayw (ca. 1225ca. 1316 CE),54 al-j (d. 1355 CE), al-Taftzn (d. 1390 CE), and al-Jurjn (d. 1413 CE), 55 and leading eventually to the profound Sufi metaphysical synthesis of the contending falsafah and kalam perspectives in al-Jms al-Durrah al-Fkhirah.56 Indeed, there would always be influential detractors, for example Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 1328 CE) and al-Suy57 (d. 1505 CE); or scholars of the caliber of say, Tj al-Dn al-Subk (d. 771/1370), for instance, who, though supportive of kalm, voiced his misgivings over what he perceived to be some of kalm jadds excesses.58 In any case for all intents and purposes, falsafah in the guise of kalm,
52

53

54

55

56

57

58

Mehdi Amin Razavi, Suhraward and the School of Illumination (Surrey: Curzon Press, 1997); also, Ian Richard Netton, Allh Transcendent: Studies in the Structure and Semiotics of Islam ic Philosophy, Theology and Cosmology (London: Routledge, 1989), 256ff. Cf. Bilal Kuspinar, Isml Ankarav on the Illuminative Philosophy : His zul-ikem: Its edition and analysis in comparison with Dawwns Shawkil al-r, together with the translation of Suhrawards Haykil al-Nr (Kuala Lumpur: ISTAC, 1996). Syamsuddin Arif, Al-mids Reception of Ibn Sn: Reading al-Nr al-Bhir f al-ikam alZawhir, in Langermann, ed., Avicenna and His Legacy, 205217. Edwin E. Calverly and James W. Pollock, trans. and eds., Nature, Man and God in Medieval Islam: Abd Allah Baydawis Text Tawali al-Anwar min Matali al-Anzar, along with Mahmud Isfahanis Commentary Matali al-Anzar Sharh Tawali al-Anwar, 3 vols. (Brill: Leiden, 2002). Shlomo Pines, Some Problems of Islamic Philosophy, in Islamic Culture (January 1937): 66 80 (on pp. 689, 80). The reading of kalm as philosophical is reflected in the title and substance of the monumental work by Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Kalm (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). Though useful and thoroughly informative, it is unfortunately marred by a too-hasty tendency to hunt for parallels to, hence sources of, kalm theories in classical, hellenistic and patristic theological thought and concepts. A compelling reaction to this is R. M. Frank, who, in his presidential address Hearing and saying what was said, said that . . . the highly nuanced language of the classical kalm was developed in an ongoing process of autonomo us discourse in Arabic. See Journal of American Oriental Society (JAOS) 116, no. 4 (1996): 615. Nr al-Dn Abd al-Ramn ibn Amad al-Jm, al-Durrah al-Fakhirah, trans. Nicholas Heer, The Precious Pearl (New York: SUNY, 1979). Cf. Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, Commentary on the ujjat al-iddq of Nr al-Dn al-Rnir. The influence of the Iy on Ibn Arabs Futut is also apparent; see, for instance, Binyamin Abrahamov, Ibn al -Arabs attitude toward al-Ghazl, in Avicenna and His Legacy, ed., Y. Tzvi Langermann (Turnhout, Beligium: Brepols, 2009). 101116. Jall al-Dn al-Suy awn al-Maniq wal-Kalm an Fann al-Maniq wal-Kalm, bound in one volume with his abridgement of Taq al-Dn ibn Taymiyyah, Naat Ahl al-mn f Radd al Maniq al-Ynn, ed. Al Sm al-Nashshr (Cairo, 1947). Tj al-Dn al-Subk, Muid al-Niam, 7980, cited in Keller Kalam and Islam, 22 and 27n.2 (italics mine). However, for a sensitive, nuanced treatment, see Talal al-Azem, Traditionalism against Scholasticism: The Debate over Curriculum in Damascus between 11501350, Masters thesis (University of Oxford, 2007), where he notes (p. 38), inter alia, that al-Subks Jam al-Jawmi is viewed as a milestone in scholastic jurisprudence (ul al-

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and maniq as a conceptual tool became thoroughly Islamised and firmly entrenched in mainstream traditional Islamic education from the Maghrib 59 to the Malay Archipelago. 60 It is against this general intellectual historical background that one must situate and evaluate the significance of the impact of al-Ghazl and al-Rz and their works on the process of the Islamization of the intellectual and empirical sciences. 4. The Ghazlian-Fakhrurzian Investigative (Tabayyun) Approach and Its Historical Impact The works of al-Ghazl and al-Fakhr al-Rz marked a historic turning point in the long movement of thought 61 in the Sunni kalm engagement with Hellenistic philosophy and science from al-Ashar (d. 935 CE), al-Mturd (d. 944 CE), al-Bqilln (d. 1013 CE), al-Juwayn (d. 1085 CE) and al-Rz (d. 1206 CE), al-Nasaf (ca. d. 1142 CE), al-Shahrastn (d. 1153 CE) to al-mid (d. 1233 CE), al-Bayw (d. ca. 1316 CE), al-j (d. 1355 CE), al-Taftzn (d. 1390 CE) and al-Jurjn (d. 1413 CE). This movement of thought integrated theological, philosophical and scientific themes, and resulted in a resurgent full-fledged philosophical kalm or dialectics (called kalm jadd or the new dialectics) characterised by an unapologetic self-confident investigative reelucidation of traditional Islamic beliefs (naqliyyt) on rational principles (mabd aqliyyah). As Sabra sees it, kalm was an argumentative approach to religion which sought, through discussion and discursive thought, to interpret and transform the content of the Islamic revelation into a rationally-based doctrine,62 and as such, it was a genuine form of knowledge that is essentially not apologetic nor polemical in its intellectual goals, for: The mutakallimn in particular made it their business to meet the falsifa on their own ground, not however by merely arguing against their opponents views, but by being able to produce a distinct body of thought that proved powerful and elaborate enough to function as a substitute for falsafa.63

59

60

61

62 63

fiqh ala arqat al-mutakallimn), and was studied by Shafiites, Malikites, and even anbalites across the Muslim world, as it continues to be in traditional seminaries even today. For the case of the Maghrib, the educational role of Ab Abd Allh al -Sans (d. 1490) and his Umm al-Barhn is significant; see article on him in EI2 by H. Bencheneb, s.v., al-Sans, with copious references. For the case of the Malay Archipelago, see, for instance, al-Attas, The Oldest Known Malay Manuscript, 152 passim. For the reception of the Umm al-Barhn in the Malay-Islamic world, see Che Razi Jusoh, Al-Sanss Umm al- Barhn in its Malay exposition: with an annotated transliteration and translation of the Malay text, (Masters thesis, International Institu te of Islamic Thought and Civilization (ISTAC), 2000) A. I. Sabra, Science and Philosophy in Medieval Islamic Theology: the Evidence of the fourteenth Century, Zeitschrift Fr Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften (ZGAIW) 9 (1994): 142 (on p. 23); see also his, Kalm Atomism as an Alternative to Hellenizing Falsafa, in Montgomery, Arabic Theology, 199272. Sabra, Science and Philosophy, 11. Ibid., p. 23 n. 24.

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In short, the kalam approach is one of both negative and positive critique. Sabra applies this characterisation to both Mutazilite and Asharite kalm,64 and in this regard, one finds ready support for him in R. M. Frank,65 and in the important recent, as yet unpublished doctoral dissertation of Muhammad Afifi al-Akiti.66 Al-Akiti notes that within a century of al-Ghazls thoroughgoing disassembling, and reassembling of falsafah, The Eastern Islamic world saw the emergence of a new kind of religious scholar: the madrasah-trained, orthodox Sunni who was an Ashar theologian as well as a Shfi jurist. These scholars included Fakhr al-Dn al-Rz, Sayf al-Dn al-mid (d. 631/1234) and Abd al-Laf al-Baghdd (d. 629/123132)all of whom were well-versed in the ilhiyyt and in the rest of the theoretical sciences of the medieval tradition of falsafa, including ontology, cosmology, and psychology. Unlike their founding father [i.e., al-Ghazl], who could only philosophize behind closed doors to a restricted audience, they were able to publish their ilhiyyt and falsaf works in the full light of day.67 We may continue to quote at some length some of al-Akitis multifaceted conclusions on the net harvest of al-Ghazls engagement with falsafah: The arguments of these three worksthe Mann, the Tahfut, and the Maqidare mainly presented at the highest scholarly level, that of burhn, a style of exposition which is itself a result of alGhazls engagements with the falsifa. For al-Ghazl, burhnbut not kalamis what he considered to be scientific knowledge, the gold standard in the art of reasoninga judgement expounded in his Miyr al-ilm. This standard is higher than what was offered in the tradition from which he emerged and the traditional proofs which he rehearses (or should we say preserves) in the Iqtid . . . . Al-Ghazl made the art of burhn acceptable in the Weltanschauung of Islams religious scholars. In time, that allowed Aristotelianizing theologians to emerge in the traditional Muslim Asharite school, men such as Fakhr al-Dn al-Rz (d. 606/120910)a doctor subtilis
64

65

66

67

See also A. I. Sabra, The Simple Ontology of Kalam Atomism: An Outline, in Early Science and Medicine 14 (2009): 6878; and idem, Kalm Atomism, 199272. Sabra, Science and Philosophy, 11; R. M. Frank, The Science of Kalm, in Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 2 (1992): 737; cf., idem, The Kalm, an Art of Contradiction-Making or Theological Science?: Some Remarks on the Question, review article in JAOS 88 (1968): 295309. Al-Akiti, The Mann of al-Ghazali: A Critical Edition of the Unpublished Major Mann with Discussion of his Restricted, Philosophical Corpus (Ph.D. diss., University of Oxford, 2008); see also idem, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Falsafa: Al -Ghazls Mann, Tahfut, and Maqid, with Particular Attention to their Falsafi Treatments of Gods Knowledge of Temporal Events, in Langermann, Avicenna and His Legacy, 51100. Al-Akiti, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly 9495 (words in square brackets mine).

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in his own right. Indeed, al-Ghazl was the first among this new breed of scholastic theologians: a committed rationalist of the Aristotelian sort, yet equally a spokesperson for the Sunni, orthodox tradition (and also, of course, a strong advocate of Sufism). However, the earlier disputes between Arabic grammar and Greek logicbest exemplified in the famous debate between Ab Sad alSirf (d. 368/979) and Ab Bishr Matt (d. 328/940) over the legitimacy of Aristotelian logicstill loomed large in the memories of many in the community of religious scholarship to which alGhazl belonged. Yet al-Ghazl did what the eminent grammarian Ibn al-Sarrj was unable to do, which was, in effect, to resolve the quarrels between those two sides and, indeed, marry them off. 68 5. The Investigative (Tabayyun)69 Nature of Dialectical Theology Investigation or research is the key word in al-athth al al-Bath (The Exhortation to Investigation), the title given by the great al-Ashar himself to his work for the purpose of encouraging the study of kalm or rationalistic theology.70 This rigorous intellectual work of investigation and research toward objective truth by engaging the sciences of the day became the governing scholarly ethos of subsequent mutakallims. Hence, we may say that, in this regard, al-Ghazl was preceded by al-Ashar, and he, perhaps, took his cue from him. According to Marmura, al-Ghazls Tahfut al-Falsifah (Incoherence of the Philosophers) was third in an integral, investigative series of four works in which he expounded on the rational methodology of the philosophers ( Miyr alIlm, i.e., The Gauge of Knowledge), summarised their cognitive objectives (Maqid al-Falsifah, i.e., The Objectives of the Philosophers), exposed the internal inconsistencies of their philosophical belief system (Tahfut al-Falsifah) and finally expounded on the true beliefs of Islam as he understood them (alIqtid f al-Itiqd, i.e., The Golden Mean of Belief). Al-Akitis detailed study of the al-Ghazls Mann corpus further reinforces this notion of scientific investigationscientific due to its inherently cognitive, constructive and positive nature, rather than merely dialectical, argumentative, reactive and apologetic. As Langermann puts it in his excellent summary of al-Akitis ample, detailed study:

68

69

70

Ibid., 91. Cf. Frank Griffle, Al-Ghazalis Philosophical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. In allusion to the verse if a vicious person brings any news, try to get at the facts ( in jakum fsiqun bi nabain fatabayyan), srah al-ujurt (49): 6, trans. Thomas Cleary, The Quran, A New Translation (Starlatch, 2004), 255. R. M. Frank, trans. & ed., al-Ashars Kitb al-athth al al-Bath, in Mlanges de l'Institut Dominicain d'tudes Orientales du Caire (MIDEO) 18 (1988): 83152; cf. Alnoor Dhanani, The Physical Theory of Kalm (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 23, for kalm as a research program.

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Afifi al-Akiti detects, uncovers, and displays three levels of writing in al-Ghazls approach to falsafa (hellenistic philosophy), particularly as formulated for the Muslim public by Ibn Sn. He presents this philosophy as ugly in his Maqid (Intentions of the Philosophers): it appears ugly because he includes without comment teachings that are clearly unacceptable. However, in his Tahfut (Incoherence of the Philosophers), this same philosophy is presented as merely bad: specific faults are identified and criticized. Finally, in the corpus of texts known as the Mann (restricted), philosophy is seen to be good; sound philosophical doctrines are exploited in order to formulate key Muslim beliefs Al-Ghazls project allows him to present a coherent explanation of the world, expressed in traditional terms, whose rationale derives from Avicennan science and philosophy; but he is also able to articulate the traditional, orthodox faith in philosophical terms. The differences in presentation between the good, the bad, and the ugly often amount, as al-Akiti amply demonstrates, to nothing more than the addition or excision of a single word or phrase. In doing so, al-Ghazl puts into practice a dictum attributed to Al, the Prophets nephew, which states that the true and the false can be very similar indeed, just like the venom of a snake so closely resembles its antidote.71 Similarly, al-Fahkr al-Rzs early work critically engaging Avicennan thought was entitled al-Mabith al-Mashriqiyyah (The Eastern Investigations). The Mabith was already at this early stage of his scholarly career a work very critical of Avicennan philosophy, somewhat in the spirit of Ab al-Barakts Kitb alMutabar, or even as some have asserted, in the spirit of al-Ghazls Tahfut.72 It cannot be said that he started out as a straight-forward peripatetic philosopher and ended up eventually to become a straightforward Ash arite mutakallim. Rather, his intellectual journey was highly nuanced from the very beginning to the very end, as indicated by the title of his last philosophico-kalm work, alMalib al-liyah, which may be roughly translated as The Lofty Researches.73 Although the century after al-Ghazl witnessed some notable mutakallimn such as al-Nasaf and al-Shahrastn, 74 al-Rz is still clearly the first post71 72

73

74

Langermann, Foreword, in Avicenna and His Legacy, viiiix. Muammad if al-Irq, al-Falsafah al-abiyyah inda Ibn Sn (Cairo: Dr al-Marif, 1971), 414; cf. Abd al-Ramn al-Badaw, al-Turth al-Ynn f al-arah al-Islmiyyah (Cairo: Dr al-Nahah al-Arabiyyah), p. 270 n. 1; cf. Muammad al-Urayb, Munalaqah alFikriyyah inda al-Imm al-Fakhr al-Rz (Beirut: Dr al-Fikr al-Lubnn, 1992), 44; cf. discussion in lih Zarkn, Fakhr al-Dn al-Rz wa Aruh al-Kalmiyyah wa al-Falsafiyyah (Cairo: Dr al-Fikr, 1963), 85ff. For a preliminary study of his physical theory largely based on his Malib, see Adi Setia, The Physical Theory of Fakhr al-Dn al-Rz, doctoral dissertation (Kuala Lumpur: ISTAC, 2005). Among others, he wrote the contra-Avicennan Kitb al-Muraah, ed. and trans. by Wilfred Madelung and Toby Mayer (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001); and a treatise on atomism, see Amad Said al-Damardash, Makhta al-Sharastn an al-Jawhar al-Fard, in Majallat Mahad al-Makhta al-Arabiyyah, 25 (1979): 195218.

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Ghazlan mutakallim who brought to comprehensive realisation the intellectual project of close, detailed and comprehensive critical engagement with Greek philosophy initiated by al-Ghazl in his Maqid al-Falsifah and Tahfut alFalsifah. While al-Ghazl succeeded in integrating Aristotelian logic into the principles of kalm and fiqh, al-Rz managed further to critically integrate much of the subject matter of Aristotelian metaphysics and physics into his many kalm and falsafah works, including his great commentary on the Qurn, al-Tafsr alKabr (The Great Exegesis), otherwise known as Maft al-Ghayb (Keys to the Unseen).75 He is noted by Dhanani as the first mutakallim to discuss space and time in a comprehensive manner, 76 and probably the first also to undertake a critical comparative study of atomism and hylomorphism of any comprehensive scope and intensity of treatment.77 This versatility is no doubt due in large part to his own intimate, first-hand knowledge of the philosophical and empirical sciences such as logic, physics, medicine, mathematics and astronomy, in addition to his complete mastery of the traditional Islamic sciences. 78 Hence, it is hardly surprising that here Fakhr al-Dn al-Rz was to become al-Ghazlis most influential continuator,79 and perhaps also his completor. According to Marmura, al-Ghazls Tahfut can be interpreted as a response to Ibn Sns wide-ranging criticisms of the kalm. 80 However, in launching his wide-ranging counter-attack, Al-Ghazl could not avoid being persuaded to some extent by the obvious objective cognitive merits of his adversary,81 hence, his appropriation of some key Avicennan ideas to flesh out his basically Asharite framework. 82 As al-Ghazls most influential continuator, and most probably also the most outstanding Sunnite figure 83 after him, al-Rz took up where the former had left off, and intensified the debate with Ibn Sn,

75 76

77

78 79

80 81

82

83

(Beirut: Dr Iy al-Turth al-Arab, 1977). Alnoor Dhanani, Al-Ghazls Perspective on Physical Theory, paper presented to the International Conference on al-Ghazls Legacy, ISTAC, Kuala Lumpur, October 2427, 2001, pp. 67. Adi Setia, The Physical Theory of Fakhr al-Dn al-Rz, doctoral dissertation (Kuala Lumpur: ISTAC, 2005). Zarkn, Fakhr al-Dn al-Rz, 3755. Gerhard Endress, The Defense of Reason: The Plea for Philosophy in the Religious Community, ZGAIW 6 (1990): 149 (on p. 37). Michael Marmura, Avicenna and the Kalm, ZGAIW 6 (1990), 173206 on 206. Binyamin Abrahamov, Ibn Sns Influence on al -Ghazls Non-Philosophical Works, in Abr-Nahrain, vol. XXIX (1991), 117; Jules Janssens, Al-Ghazzls Tahfut: Is It Really a Rejection of Ibn Sns Philosophy?, in Journal of Islamic Studies, 12:1 (2001), 117; Richard M. Frank, Al-Ghazalis Use of Avicennas Philosophy, in Revue des Etudes Islamiques, 5557 (198789), 271285. Richard M. Franks misgivings notwithstanding; see his Creation and the Cosmic System: AlGhazl and Avicenna (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitatsverlag, 1992). Fathallah Kholeif, ed. and trans., A Study of Fakhr al-Dn al-Rz and His Controversies in Transoxiana (Beirut: Dar el-Machreq, 1966), 6. Tj al-Dn al-Subk considers him to be the mujaddid after al-Ghazl; see Tj al-Dn al-Subk Abd al-Wahhb ibn Al al-Subk, abaqt al-Shfiiyyah al-Kubr, ed. M. Tanahi et al., 5 vols. (Beirut, 1992), 1: 202.

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even while Ibn Rushd, his contemporary in the Islamic far west, was preparing his own counter-Tahfut to criticise both Ibn Sn and al-Ghazl.84 Al-Ghazls engagement with falsafah was such that he can be said to have succeeded in kalmising philosophy and, as an unavoidable consequence, philosophising kalm, thus integrating (if not con-fusing) the two originally separate intellectual disciplines. Such is the judgement of Ibn Khaldn, and one cannot but agree with him somewhat after even a cursory reading of al-Rzs works.85 So it seems that historically the exciting intellectual combat 86 between falsafah and kalm has always been a dynamic two-sided affair, with blows and counter-blows actively exchanged and no implications, however nuanced or subtle, left hidden and unexplicated. Kalm may have won finally87 but as can be surmised from Ibn Khaldns and Tj al-Dn al-Subks remarks, the victory was somewhat bitter-sweetkalm ended up thoroughly imbued with the philosophising spirit which demands of Muslims that they, as responsible thinking individuals, be self-conscious and self-critical about their beliefs, alGhazls (somewhat ambivalent?) Iljm al-Awmm notwithstanding.88 Just as the unexamined life was not worth living (as it would be aimless), so it was as if the unexamined faith was not worth keeping (as it could be easily shaken and corrupted by doubts generated by the onslaught of alien ideas). The long-term intellectual consequences of al-Ghazls and after him, alRzs wholesale creative appropriation of the philosophical sciences into kalm discourse was duly, if critically and even reluctantly, appreciated not only by subsequent Asharite mutakallimn but also by anbalite theologians such as Ibn Taymiyyah,89 and by the formulators of Sh kalm in the Persian East, such as als (d. 1274),90 and the Christian scholastics of the late medieval Latin West.91

84

85 86 87

88

89 90

91

Simon van den Bergh, trans., Averroes Tahfut al-Tahfut (London: Luzac, 1978). An aspect of this Ibn Rushd-Ghazlian debate is well summarised by George F. Hourani, The Dialogue between al-Ghazl and the Philosophers on the Origin of the World, 2 parts, in Muslim World 48 (1958). Ibn Khaldn, Muqaddimah, 3: 43. Hourani, Dialogue, 183. Interestingly Hourani (Dialogue, p. 191) judges Ibn Rushd argumentative performance to be disappointing, as does van den Bergh (Averroes, p. 20, and p. 23. n. 1). Al-Ghazl, Iljm al-Awmm an Ilm al-Kalm, trans. Abdullah bin Hamid Ali, A Return to Purity of Faith (Philadelphia: Lamppost, 2008). See, for instance, Hoover, Perpetual Creativity, 287329. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Fakhr al-Dn al-Rz, in A History of Muslim Philosophy, ed. M. M. Sharif, 2 vols. (Delhi: D. K. Publications), 1: 642 656 (on p. 646). Cf. editors introduction to al-Rzs al-Malib al-liyah, ed. Amad ijz al-Saqq, 9 vols. in 5 books (Beirut: Dr alKitb al-Arab, 1987), vol. 89, pp. 12ff. Nar al-Dn al-si can be said to be the pivotal figure who helped Avicennan philosophy recover somewhat from the Fakhrurzian onslaught. See also Hans Daiber, Al-si, Nar al-Dn, in EI2. Pines, Some Problems, p. 68 n. 2; cf. Hans Daiber, unpublished ISTAC lectures, parts 5 and 6 with copious invaluable references.

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The intellectual impact of this new kalm as manifested about two centuries later in al-js al-Mawqif and al-Jurjns commentary on it92 was also felt by medieval Jewish thinkers93 and the thinkers, philosophers and scientists of the European Renaissance and Enlightenment who shared with the mutakallimn a determined rejection of Aristotelianism and a preference for experimentation with various forms of atomism, as well as, the belief in an omnipotent and free creator.94 One may also add that the new kalm also impacted on early modern European explorations of various forms of occasionalism and their epistemological, cosmological and theological implications. 95 Modern-day Christian creationist theologians and philosophers have also not failed to notice the Ghazlian-Fakhrurzian intellectual historical link in the further development of the kalm cosmological argument and its fine-tuning in modern physical, philosophical and mathematical terms.96 6. Kalm Jadd and Contemporary Concerns The whole point of this schematic sketch of the intellectual historical impact and relevance of the new kalm shall be, in what follows, elaborated insofar as it may interest thinking Muslims today who are deeply concerned about how to intelligently and effectively engage the all-enveloping secular modernity and its intellectually seductive language of discourse. I have to say that Muslim progress in appreciating their rich intellectual heritage will not be boosted by the prevailing negative attitude, implicit or
92

93

94

95

96

Aud al-Dn Abd al-Ramn ibn Amad al-j, Kitb al-Mawqif f Ilm al-Kalm, ed. Ibrhm al-Dusq Atiyyah and Amad al-anbuli (Cairo: Matbaat al-Ulm); al-Sayyid al-Sharf Al ibn Muammad al-Jurjn, Shar al-Mawqif f Ilm al-Kalm (Beirut: Dr al-Jl, 1997). For instance, Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 1: 179ff. Shlomo Pines notes that al-Rzs al-Mabith alMashriqiyyah was already translated into Hebrew in the fourteenth century and used as a basis for the Hebrew version of al-Ghazls al-Maqid al-Falsifah. See his Studies in Islamic Atomism, trans. Michael Schwarz and ed. Tzvi Langermann (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1997), p. 97 n. 152. On the influence of the Maqid and the Tahfut on medieval Jewish thinkers, see Steven Harvey, Avicennas Influence on Jewish Thought, in Langermann, Avicenna and His Legacy, 338339. Cf. Harry Austryn Wolfson, Repercussions of the Kalam in Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). Sabra, Science and Philosophy, 52. A separate, detailed inquiry is obviously needed regarding late kalm influence on the metaphysical foundations of early modern science. On early modern European atomism and occasionalism in relation to kalm atomism, see John Lane Bell, The Continuous and the Infinitesimal in Mathematics and Philosophy (Milan: Polimetrica, 2006), especially Chapter 1, The Continous and the Discrete in Ancient Greece, the Orient, and the European Middle Ages, pp. 2162; James Fredrick Naify, Arabic and European Occasionalism: A Comparison of al-Ghazalis Occasionalism and Its Critique by Averroes with Malebranches Occasionalism and Its Criticisms in the Cartesian Tradition (Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego, 1975); Majid Fakhry , Islamic Occasionalism and its Critique by Averroes and Aquinas (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1958); and Stuart Brown, ed., Nicolas Malebranche: His Philosophical Critics and Successors (Assen/Maastricht: Van Gorcum, 1991), 49, 8193, and 116130. For the kalm cosmological argument in Christian creationist thought, see the excellent exposition by William L. Craig, The Kalm Cosmological Argument (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2000).

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explicit, amongst many Muslim academicians, educationists and intellectuals, toward considering the contemporary relevance, or lack thereof, of the seemingly abstruse and error-prone traditional Islamic philosophies and sciences of those long bygone and forgotten centuries. Quite on the contrary, Professor Hans Daiber asserts that Islamic philosophy exercises the mind and trains it to grasp structures and methods revealed through the passage of time. Its comprehension represents a constant challenge to the powers of human understanding and its creative force, the imagination.97 In short, if Muslims fail to exercise their minds to study and appreciate the achievement of their rich and varied intellectual history, they will thereby fail to comprehend the predicament of their present moment, and in turn fail to take positive action for their future revival as a constructive civilisational force for the common good in the post-modern, post-industrial and post-development world.98 Intelligent, thinking, reflective, self-conscious Muslims should read their rich classical past as a beacon for the present toward the future, for the past has not really passed away into eternal oblivion but is always perpetually present as a living tradition from which insights (tabirah) and lessons (ibrah) can always be drawn for overcoming the internal and external challenges and crises of the present age, or of any future ages for that matter; indeed, in their histories is a lesson for a people possessing of heart-felt reflection.99 It has been said by not a few observers to the effect that in sheer intellectual range, al-Ghazl and al-Rz stood alone, and the issues they raised and the difficulties they faced gave their thought a character that in many places addresses concerns that we find to be modern and perennial.100 A case in point is al-Ghazls overriding concern in the first book of his magnum opus Iy Ulm al-Dn, Kitb al-Ilm (The Book of Knowledge) and in his introduction to the Tahfut for not conflating the form of knowledge with its substance and content, and for differentiating between true and pseudo-sciences, as well as differentiating between beneficial and harmful sciencesa concern which resonates very well with current debates in both East and West about the form, substance, methods and objectives of modern religious and secular education. 101 The revival of his
97 98

99 100

101

Daiber, What is the meaning, xxxiii. That is, the current situation in which there is much ongoing rethinking of the foundational notions of secular modernity such as development and progress; see the rest of the paper. Ysuf: 111. In Peter G. Ridell and Tony Street, eds., Islam: Essays on Scripture, Thought and Society, a Festschrift in Honour of Anthony H. Johns (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 11 (paraphrased). That was said in regard to the Maft, but it applies just as well to many other major works of al-Rz, especially the Malib A good, wide-ranging discussion is Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud, The Educational Philosophy and Practice of Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas (Kuala Lumpur, ISTAC, 1998); see also his Dewesternization and Islamization: Their Epistemic Framework and Final Purpose, a paper presented at The International Conference on Islamic University Education in Russia and Its SurroundingAreas, Kazan, Tatarstan, Russia 27-30 Sept 2009, organized by Russian Islamic University (RIU-Kazan) and theInstitute of Islamic Culture (IIC-Moscow) in Cooperation with the Federation the Universities of the Islamic World (FUIC) and ISESCO (http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/54419348?access_key=key-1jiwj64pfbitns7a0w78); and published in Noritah Omar, Washima Che Dan et al., eds., Critical Perspectives on Literature and Culture in the New World Order (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 2 25. See

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and al-Rzs intellectual jihd in the postmodern dissipative and nihilistic age may well result in the realisation of a contemporary, distinctively Islamic counterscience (or counter system of knowledge and counter academia) powerful and elaborate enough to replace a modern, exploitative Western science and civilisation that is now speeding headlong into its twilight, death-bound 102 phase.103 But what about al-Ghazls Iljm al-Awmm an Ilm al-Kalm, which seems to bar Muslims in general from indulging in discursive philosophy and dialectical theology? The answer in fact lies in the very title of the book, Iljm alAwmm, which means Barring the (Unlearned) Laity, and not Iljm al-Khaw or Barring the (Intellectual) Elite, which of course begs the question of what is really meant by awmm and what is meant by khaw. In this age of institutionalised mass public education and electronic mass media in which the West has become something akin to a disembodied megamachine that has long cut itself loose from its original mastersa kind of turbocharged techni-Frankenstein run amok on the world stage104an age when the West and the East are intermingling in every nook and cranny, strange sciences and stranger ideas that were once only accessible to the relatively few dedicated intellectual khaw (elite) are now required standard readings for high school students and university undergraduates and postgraduates who do not really know why they should be in schools in the first place or have a clue as to what the word university really means for and demands of them. In an age when the laity are compelled in one way or another, directly or indirectly, to become from among the educated and informed elite, it will be hard to find anyone, farmer or professor, to whom a good dose of Ghazlan Tahfuti kalmreexpressed of course in modern idiomwill not be of real remedy for recovering and preserving the health and wholesomesness of their minds and souls.
also Claude Alvares and Shad Saleem Faruqi, eds., Decolonising the University: The Emerging Quest for Non-Eurocentric Paradigms (Penang: USM, 2012). Ulrich Duchrow, Why Capitalism is Death-bound and How People can Opt for Life: A Theological Proposal to Economists, (online at: www.peaceforlife.org/resources/liferesources/2011/11-0325-duchrowcapitalismdeathlife.html). John Horgan, The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1996); James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Grove Press, 2006); Michael C. Ruppert, Confronting Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post Peak Oil World (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2009); and many other similar books. Serge Latouche talks about the Wests invention of the megamachine which uproots and destroys traditional cultures and societies; see Eurocontinentalism Journal (May 2012), http://eurocontinentalism.com/tag/common-decency/. See also his The Westernization of the World, 4546, on how the West is like a machine. Cf. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), especially 133148 on the autonomy of technique. Needless to say, the works of Lewis Mumford criticizing modern technology and exposing the fact of how human beings have become part of the machine as amoral servo -units, bereft of ethical self-reflection and involvement, are very important for all thinking Muslims to read; see his The Myth of the Machine, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967 and 1970), and Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934).

102

103

104

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7. Kalm Jadd and the Islamization of Falsafah Hellenising falsafah was in the beginning a largely autonomous (i.e., autonomous of traditional orthodoxy), comprehensive conceptual system (or body of thought) for relating the absolute to the relative, or the transcendent to the contingent, in metaphysical, physical and mathematical terms by using its own hellenistic conceptual categories and logico-rational methodology. Moreover, many intelligent Muslims were drawn into that rich universe of intellectual discourse, either directly through studying the philosophical works of al-Frb and Ibn Sn, or indirectly through cultivating the empirical and mathematical sciences generated by that philosophy. That in itself was not a threat to traditional Islamic orthodoxy as represented by the fuqah and muaddithn. But when it became increasingly clear to the defenders of orthodoxy that the language used by falsafah to describe the relation between God and the world was compromising the foundational Qurnic doctrines of divine omnipotence and omniscience and the absolute dependence of the world on God (iftiqr al-khalq il al-khliq), or even effectively denying it altogether, then orthodoxy had no choice but to step in forcefully and decisively, as it were, and come to a head on, close engagement with the truth-claims of falsafah, especially when some of those truth-claims were seen to pose a direct challenge to the Sunni theological consensus established by the Ashar-Mturd-ahaw school. The situation was akin to the predicament faced by Frodo, as it were, who, in order to destroy the Ring of Power, had to bring it out of his home in the Shire and venture far away with it into the infernal depths of Mordor where the Shadow lies.105 This long process of close engagement culminated in al-Ghazl and alRz who decided to neutralise the intellectual-theological threat posed by the autonomous status of falsafah, not only by refuting some its truth claims (negative critique), but, by also critically and systemically bringing that whole intellectual edifice within the credal ambit of traditional orthodoxy (positive critique), so that, henceforth, all Muslims, regardless of their particular intellectual inclinations with respect to the traditional and intellectual sciences, would discourse within the ethico-cognitive parameters of the worldview of divine revelation and prophetic tradition. The Ghazlan-Fakhrurzian encounter with falsafah can thus be summarised in three words: engagement, neutralisation, appropriationin effect, a systemic and programmatic Islamisation of falsafah and all the logical, empirical and mathematical sciences that have been generated from it. In short, kalm jadd was a long-term theologico-philosophico-scientific research programme that has served its purpose wonderfully well in the classical age of Islam, and my thesis
105

Though the author himself denies it, J. R. R. Tolkiens The Lord of the Rings can be read in many ways as an eloquent and captivating allegory of the sorry state of western civilization in the world war decades of the twentieth century, rendered compellingly real to the readers imagination by one who had himself fought deep in the foul, muddy trenches of the Western Front and survived to express his experience of those dark and bloody years in the novel of the century; see Daniel Grotta, The Biography of J. R. R. Tolkien: Architect of Middle Earth (Philadelphia: Rummy Press, 1992); Stratford Caldecott, The Power of the Ring: The Spiritual Vision Behind the Lord of the Rings (Crossroad Publishing, 2005); cf. the Muslim perspective on it by Mahmoud Shelton, Alchemy in Middle Earth: The Significance of J R R. Tolkiens The Lord of the Rings (Temple of Justice Books, 2003).

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here is that that research programme needs to be vigorously revived and applied to current intellectual challenges, for this is the very Jihad of the Word and positive action which the great mujaddid/renewer of our age, Badiuzzaman Said Nursi calls us to undertake.106 There is a real need for Muslim ulam, scholars, intellectuals, thinkers, researchers and scientists of todays age to learn afresh from that rich intellectual historical experience and thereby revive that research program in contemporary terms within a context of close, critical and self-confident engagement with all aspects of Western science and philosophy now being imbued by Muslims through their witting or unwitting participation in the modern academia.107 8. Kalm of the Age (Kalm al-Ar) and the Worldview of Islam The intellectual challenges to tradition faced and overcame by al-Ghazl and alRz close to a thousand years ago has now again resurfaced in a new form and in a new idiom in the guise of the modern, secular, western sciences and philosophies systematically imparted to Muslims in the modern mainstream academia, but with a much more draconian objective, namely, a thoroughgoing nihilistic disenchantment of the world and the whole of life and existence. Moreover, young, intelligent Muslims in their countless millions are unsuspectingly imbueing this secularising nihilism masquerading as value-free education and knowledge quite oblivious to its negative cognitive, moral and actual impact 108 on their belief, practice and value system as Muslims, and on their communities and societies, if insofar as being Muslim to them denotes any substantial intellectual and practical content different and distinct from being non-Muslim. In the face of this challenge, the relevance and lesson of the GhazlanFakhrurzian encounter with falsafah to Muslims in the present age may be encapsulated into what can be called the Kalm of the Age initiative (kalm alar or Dialetics of the Age) which pertains to a creative revival of the GhazlanFakhrurzian dialectics for coming to terms with the multifarious challenges of modern western sciences, ideologies and philosophies and their impact on our religio-cultural traditions, values and communities. By coming to terms we mean coming to terms in a way that serves rather than subverts the Worldview of Islam, which al-Attas has defined as follows: The worldview of Islam is the vision of reality and truth that reveals to the Muslim mind what existence is all about. It is a metaphysical
106

107

108

Nursi, Jihad of the Word and Positive Action (Istanbul: Sozler, n.d.). This is saying truth to power and money peacefully not by physical violence, as exemplified in Nursis jihad against the radical secularization of post-Ottoman Turkey by Ataturk. Here, the West is state of mind, an outlook, not a particular physical geographical or ethnic or even national entity. It is a kind masterless mega-machine like the the one dramatized in the film Matrix; see Latouche, The Westernization of the World. Adi Setia, The Theologico-Scientific Research Program of the Mutakallimn: Intellectual Historical Context and Contemporary Concerns with Special Reference to Fakhr al-Dn alRz, Islam & Science 3, no. 2 (Winter 2005): 127151. i.e., impact on their understanding and actions.

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survey of the visible as well as the invisible worlds, including the perspective of life as a whole. In this holistic perspective of life, the duny-aspect of life is thoroughly integrated into the khirah-aspect of life, and in which the khirah-aspect of life has ultimate and final significance.109 My tone in the following lines will be deliberately personal and directed primarily to a Muslim audience who knows and cares for their Worldview, i.e., the Worldview of Islam,110 and desires to see it operative again in both their private and public domains of life through a proactive, constructive engagement with the dominant modern Western secular worldviewa worldview with which many major Western thinkers, authors and activists are themselves becoming increasingly disillusioned as evidenced in their current conceptual and practical experiments with many diverse strands of postmodernism and various other postisms.111
109 110

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Prolegomena, 15 passim (abridged and slightly paraphrased). Comprehensively defined and elaborated by Professor al-Attas in his Prolegomena to the Metaphysics of Islam: An Exposition of the Fundamenatl Elements of the Worldview of Islam (Kuala Lumpur: ISTAC, 2001). This important and profound book can be read as (i) a guide to the Islamic intellectual tradition, as well as (ii) a guide to applying that tradition in navigating ourselves safely through the pitfalls of modernity. That is to say, post-developmentalism, post-industrialism, post-colonialism, post-growthism, post-materialism, post-capitalism, post-rationalism, post-scientism, post-democracy, etc. For a small sampling, see, Paul Feyerabend, Farewell to Reason (London: Verso, 1988); P. Radin, Primitive Man as Philosopher (London & New York: Appleton, 1927); Christian Comeliau, The Impasse of Modernity: Debating the Future of the Global Market Economy , trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Zed Books, 2002); and R. Vachon, Ashis Nandy, Wolfgang Sachs, and Raimon Pannikar, The Post-Modern Era: Some Signs and Priorities, in Interculture 2 , no. 1 (Winter 1996); cf. Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash, Grassroots Post-Modernism: Beyond Human Rights, the Individual Self, and the Global Economy (New York: Peter Lang, 1996); Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983); Serge Latouche, The Westernization of the World: The Significance, Scope and Limits of the Drive towards Global Uniformity, trans. Rosemary Morris (Oxford: Polity Press, 1996); Robert J. Ringer, How You Can Find Happiness During the Collapse of Western Civilization (New York: Qed/Harper and Row, 1983); B. McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Anchor Books, 1999); Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980); Frederic F. Clairmont, The Rise and Fall of Economic Liberalism: The Making of the Economic Gulag, republished (Penang: Southbound and Third World Network, 1996). Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, 3d ed. (London: Verso, 1993); David Lindley, The End of Physics: The Myth of a Unified Theory (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Majid Rahnema, Science and Subjugated Knowledges: A Third World Perspective, in Knowledge Across Cultures: Universities East and West, ed. Ruth Hayhoe (Toronto/Wuhan: OISE Press and Hubei Education Press, 1993); Ashis Nandy, Science, Hegemony and Violence (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1988); L. Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in the Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); idem, Autonomous Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977); R. Romanyshin, Technology as Symptom and Dream (London: Routledge, 1989); Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991); G. A. Almond, M. Chodorow, and R. H. Pearce, Progress and Its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); W. W. Wagar, Modern Views on the Origins of the Idea of Progress, in Journal of the History of Ideas 28 (1967): 5570; Larry Laudan, Progress and Its Problems: Towards a Theory of Scientific Growth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); James Bernard, The

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The Kalm of the Age (kalm al-ar) is the systemic deconstruction of all the Western sciences and philosophies and their reconstruction from within the epistemic and axiological framework of the Worldview of Islam, by which, along the way, some of those sciences and philosophies or aspects thereof may be evaluated to be irrelevant or even discardable altogether, while others modified, restructured, appropriated and redirected to serve the higher axiological purposes of the divine Law (maqid al-sharah),112 i.e., to serve the true purpose of our lives as Muslims in this temporal world, which to us is but the temporal seedbed of the next world of eternal life (al-duny mazraat al-khirah). We should not allow our present preoccupation with the current sociopolitical upheavals in the Muslim world,113 or intra-Muslim credal controversies and sectarian strife, or even the commendable inter-religious Common Word

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Death of Progress (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1973); Trevor Blackwell and Jeremy Seabrook, The Revolt Against Change: Towards a Conserving Radicalism (London: Vintage, 1993); K. A. Gourlay, World of Waste: Dilemmas of Industrial Development (London: Zed Books, 1992); Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society (reprinted Berkeley: Celestial Arts: 1989); idem, Person/Planet: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society (Backinprint.com, 2003); Ivan Illich, Shadow Work (London: Marion Boyars, 1981), which helps us to re-look the past 500 years so as to be able to really look afresh to the next 500; B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, and H. Tiffin, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1995); Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith, trans. Patrick Camiller (London and New York: Zed Books and Cape Town: UCT Press, 2000); Majid Rahnema with Victoria Bawtree, The Post-Development Reader (London: Zed Books, 2001); Jeremy Seabrook, Victims of Development: Resistance and Alternatives (London: Verso, 1999); Ramashray Roy, Against the Current: Essays in Alternative Development (Delhi: Satvahan Publications, 1982); Wolfgang Sachs, ed., The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power (London: Zed Books, 1992); W. Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington DC: Howard University Press, 1981); Bruce M. Rich, Mortgaging the Earth: The World Bank, Environmental Impoverishment and the Crisis of Development (London: Earthscan, 1994); Kothari Rajni, Rethinking Development: In Search of Human Alternatives (Croton-onHudson: Apex Press, 1989); Samir Amin, Maldevelopment: Anatomy of a Global Failure (London: Zed Books, 1990); H. W. Arndt, The Rise and Fall of Economic Growth: A Study in Contemporary Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Paul Ekins, The Living Economy: A New Economics in the Making (London: Routledge, 1986); Richard Douthwaite, The Growth Illusion: How Economic Growth Has Enriched the Few, Impoverished the Many and Endangered the Planet (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1992); E. Herman Daly and John B. Cobb, Jr, For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment and a Sustainable Future (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971); Cheryl Payer, The World Bank: A Critical Analysis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1982); Susan George and Fabrizo Sabelli, Faith and Credit: The World Bank Secular Empire (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 199); Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy: Themes for the 21st Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004); Zygmunt Bauman, Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003); and Daniel M. Warner, Post -Growthism: From Smart Growth to Sustainable Development, in Environmental Practice 8, no. 3 (September 2006). Muammad al-hir ibn Ashr, Treatise on Maqid al-Sharah, trans. Mohamed el-Tahir alMessawi (Petaling Jaya: IBT, 2006); Ahmad al-Raysuni, Imam al-Shatibis Theory of the Higher Objectives and Intents of Islamic Law, trans. Nancy Roberts (Petaling Jaya: IBT, 2006); Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee, Islamic Jurisprudence (Usul al-Fiqh) (Petaling Jaya: The Other Press, 2003), especially 195212; and idem, Theories of Islamic Law: The Methodology of Ijtihd (Petaling Jaya: The Other Press, 2002), especially 189268. Ali A. Allawi, The Crisis of Islamic Civilization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

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initiative114 to divert us from the great, if not greater, task of drawing creatively from the profound lessons of traditional classical kalm to meet head on the real underlying, common challenge of the agethe challenge of a subtle and sophisticated secularism, materialism, scientism and nihilism surreptitiously and systemically imparted into the minds and hearts of both Muslim and non-Muslim students, intellectuals and scholars in Western and Western-type universities (including those labelling themselves Islamic University). For there is no war between religions but only between religions and the ideologies of secularism, consumerism, scientism and nihilism, and hence, we need a Common Word between Religions in order to effectively engage that common enemy. As Keller puts it, The real challenge to religion today is the mythic power of science to theologize its experimental method, and imply that since it has not discovered God, He must not exist.115 This call of the Kalm of the Age is precisely the call which Afifi al-Akiti is inviting us to heed in his important article, The Negotiation of Modernity through Tradition in Contemporary Muslim Intellectual Discourse: The Neo-Ghazalian, Attasian Perspective,116 but then again we must learn to know how to negotiate to the advantage of religion rather than to its detriment, and this is no easy task. This is a common challenge insofar as it challenges the paramount emphasis on humanitys conscious responsiveness to Transcendence expressed in all traditional religions. Keller himself has alluded to this real challenge of the age when he says, . . . attacks today on religion by scientism should be met by Muslims as Ashar and Mturid met the Mutazilites and Jahmites in their times: with a dialectic critique of the premises and conclusions thoroughly grounded in their own terms. The names that come to mind in our day are not Ashar, Baqillani, and Razi, but rather those like Huston Smith in his Beyond the Post-Modern Mind, Charles Le Gai Eaton in his King of the Castle, Keith Ward in his God, Chance, and Necessity, and even non-religious writers like Paul Davies in The Mind of God, and John Horgan in his The End of Science and The Undiscovered Mind. Answering reductionist attacks on religion is a communal obligation, which Muslims can only ignore at their peril.

114 115 116

See the official website, http://www.acommonword.com/. Keller, Kalam and Islam, 25. In Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud & Muhammad Zaini Uthman, eds., Knowledge, Language, Thought & the Civilization of Islam: Essays in Honor of Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas (Kuala Lumpur: UTM, 2010), 119134. See also Adi Setia, Dewesternizing and Islamizing the Sciences: Operationalizing the Neo-Ghazalian, Attasian Vision, paper presented in the OneDay Colloquium on Islam & Secularism, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 24 July 2010.

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This too is of the legacy of kalam, or the aptness of words to answer words.117 In the light of this consideration, understanding the Ghazlan Tahfut and the Fakhrurzian Malib and the creative re-articulation of this understanding in contemporary philosophical, dialectical and scientific terms, should be rendered accessible to all who are studying, teaching or practising the Western sciences those who, by the very fact of their involvement or engagement with the modern sciences, cease altogether to be from amongst the awmm but become, whether they like it or not, from among the khaw. If one is not prepared to be trained, prepared and guided like Frodo, then they have no business venturing into Mordor. The real intellectual battleground for Muslims in the modern age is the neo-Dahrism 118 of the western sciences which many of them gleefully imbibe, including those students who might even now be learning the dn at the feet of the great living shuykh of our time in Malaysia, Indonesia, Patani, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Yemen, Morocco, Mauritania, Pakistan and India, or even in Britain and the United States and Canada, nourishing themselves from the wellsprings of tradition. Gleefully, because it alludes to the joyful innocence or naivete of those who do not have a clue as to what they are actually imbi bing as education or knowledge or skills and other apparently good things in the modern, western-style universities. By enrolling in the modern academia, they are rather unlikely to be able to avoid becoming unwitting intellectual victims of that grand, elaborate and tedious charade called science, technology and economics, the funn al-unn (multifarious sciences of conjectures) 119 of the current age. 120 Gleeful in the beginning but tragic the end result.
117

118

119

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Keller, Kalam and Islam, 26. Bibliographic details pertaining to the books cited by Keller and their authors are as follows: Hutson Smith, Beyond the Post-Modern Mind: The Place of Meaning in a Global Civilization, revised 2d ed. (Wheaton, Illinois: Quest Books, 2003); Charles Le Gai Eaton, King of the Castle: Choice and Responsibility in the Modern World , new ed. (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1994); Keith Ward, God, Chance & Necessity (Oxford: One World, 2001); Paul Davies, The Mind of God: Scientific Basis for a Rational World (New York: Touchstone, 1992); and Horgan, The End of Science; idem, The Undiscovered Mind: How the Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication, and Explanation (New York: Touchstone, 1999) Literally temporalism, temporalists, referring to the beliefs of the materialists and atheists who believe in the eternity of the world and disbelieve in the Hereafter; see the article Dahriyya, in http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/ei2/dahriyya.htm, which includes useful references. Allusion to al-Ghazls use of the term in the beginning of his hard-hitting introduction to his Tahfut al-Falsifah, intro. al al-Dn al-Hawwr (Beirut: al-Maktabah al-Ariyyah, 2007), 41. Marmura translates it as multifarious beliefs, but it can also be more literally rendered as the multifarious sciences (or varieties) of conjectures, in which case then al Ghazl is rebuking those so enamored of Greek philosophywhich is but sciences based on conjectures rather than certain knowledgethat they have gone so far as to belittle the devotions and ordinances prescribed by the divine law. See also Michael Marmura, trans., AlGhazali: The Incoherence of the Philosophers (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 2000), 12. A very recent case in point is the new religious Ahl al -Sunnah university launched with great fanfare in Malaysia, but even a cursory perusal of its poorly prepared brochure shows a complete lack of any intelligent, coherent exposition as to how its self-proclaimed

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O youth, how many nights have you remained awake repeating science and poring over books and have denied yourself sleep. I do not know what the purpose of it was. If it was attaining worldly ends and securing its vanities and acquiring its dignities and surpassing your contemporaries and such like, woe to you and again woe.121 The great task of these students and scholars is to see through this intellectual charade and then to systemically construct and elaborate a sophisticated counterintellectual framework or dialectics by which the tradition can be brought to bear critically and constructively on these Western sciences, lest they go on allowing their own knowledge of tradition to be intellectually impotent and silent or even seriously compromised and even corrupted122 in the face of a modern, aggressive, arrogant and even militant neo-Dahrism now reinventing itself as globalization. The fault then lies not within the tradition as such but within their own minds and hearts for failing to understand the true nature and purpose of knowledge so lucidly expounded in al-Ghazls Kitb al-Ilm, 123 and to operationalize that understanding today in their encounter with the modern sciences. None of these concerns about the negative impact of the modern knowledge system are new, for even many of the conscientious thinkers of the West have been making similar forceful indictment of their own elaborate intellectual edificewa shahid al anfusihim = and they bear witness against their own selves.124 These thinkers include names such as Martin Heidegger,125
foundational Sunni theological framework will be made to bear evaluatively on its selection and conduct of academic programs, the design of curricula, and the choice of academic faculties or departments to establish or not to establish. Interestingly, one of the papers presented at the launch (by Tim Winter, no less) actually criticised, albeit indirectly, this thoughtless mimicking of conventional western-style educational structure and content. It will of course be impolite for me to name that university explicitly, but those in the know will know. al-Ghazl, Ayyuha al-Walad, trans. G. H. Scherer, O Disciple (Beirut: American Press, 1932), 57. A case in point is the Islamic Banking and Finance (IBF) industry which has been thoroughly coopted and corrupted into serving the neoliberal economic agenda, resulting in the reduction of Shariah (Islamic law) to fiqh (jurisprudence ) and then to tamwl (finance). The best critique of IBF so far is Mahmoud A. El-Gamal, Islamic Finance: Law, Economics, and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). There is now a strong groundswell of systematic response amongst fuqaha and intellectuals against this subversion of sacred law to the service of Mammon; see for instance, Adi Setia, Mumalah and the Revival of the Islamic Gift Economy, in Islam & Science (Summer, 2011), 6788. It is the first book of the Iy. See the splendid English translation by Nabih Amin Faris, The Book of Knowledge (New Delhi: Idara, 2008). Professor al-Attass philosophy of education and project of Islamization of Contemporary Knowledge is inspired to a great extent by the Kitb al-Ilm; see the excellent study by Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud, The Educational Philosophy and Practice of Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas: An Exposition of the Original Concept of Islamization (Kuala Lumpur: ISTAC). Allusion to the verse the life of the world deceived them and so they testified against themselves that they were atheistic [ingrate; disbelivers]. (wa gharrathum al-aytu al-duny wa shahid al anfusihim annahum kn kfirn ) (Clearys translation) in al-Anm (6): 130. We may elaborate by saying that they indict the very structure they are a part of simply because they know it so well from the inside, and thereafter some of them may disown it, which is only

121

122

123

124

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Jacques Ellul,126 Karl Polanyi,127 E. F. Schumacher,128 Serge Latouche,129 Michael Sahlins,130 James Howard Kunstler,131 and many others. In fact, a whole century ago, the eminent American philosopher and psychologist, William James had already come to the damning judgement that, The most significant characteristic of modern civilization is the sacrifice of the future for the present, and all the power of science has been prostituted for this purpose.132 Similarly, in his important book, Natures Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, which can be read as an eloquent indictment of Wsetern technoscientific negative attitude towards the integrity of nature, Donald Worster says: The sudden acceleration of environmental damage throughout the world since World War Two has been largely the consequence of our scientific enterprisethere can be no getting around the fact that science has made possible the modern devastation of nature.133 Without a rigorous Kalm of the Age, Muslims today cannot be too sure that they are in fact not being complicit in that sacrifice of the future for the present. Knowing the tradition alone is not enough, for the carriers of tradition must also know how to read the situation of the age (awl al-ar), that they may bring the former to bear creatively, evaluatively and critically on the latter through the means of a Dialectics of the Age (kalm al-ar), and thereby, avoid falling into the pitfalls of nihilistic neo-Dahrism masquerading as evolution,
possible if they admit to they own complicity in it. For Muslims, in the Hereafter, our own hands and legs and other bodily organs will indict us for our complicity in the machine, if we are careless. The West is currently engaged in a profound civilizational self-confession and self-indictment, and has been earnestly doing so for the past few decades. In this sense, much of the tahafuti hardwork has already been done by the thinking, honest and conscientious people of the West itself. Muslims today simply have to be aware of this work, in constrast to al-Ghazali who had to do the tahafut work himself. This is a situation also alluded to by Keller in his important kalam article. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, in Basic Writings, ed. David Krell (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993). Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage, 1967), which has been described (on the front cover) as a penetrating analysis of our technical civilization and of the effect of an increasingly standardized culture on the future of man. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001). E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (New York: Harper Collins, 2010). Serge Latouche, The Westernization of the World; idem, In the Wake of the Affluent Society: An Exploration of Post-Development (London: Zed Books, 1993). Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Piscataway, New Jersey: Aldine Transaction, 1972); idem, The Western Illusion of Human Nature (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2008). Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Coverging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century (New York: Grove/Atlantic, 2005). As cited in Kunstler, The Long Emergency, 185 (italics mine). (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 343.

125

126

127

128

129

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132 133

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progress, historicism, growth, development, change, globalisation, science and technology. This is called neo-Dahrism because it harks back to the Dahrism and the Dahriyyn 134 of old, so that we may be shaken out of our slumber to real constructive, proactive and anticipative intellectual and educational action, and hence, social action, and thereby go way beyond the narrow post-9/11 agenda that has been directly or indirectly imposed on us, for the real ongoing challenge is at core intellectual, even if there happens in the near future a complete geopolitical reapproachment between Islam and the West.135 The whole problem with neo-Dahrism (al-dahriyyah al-jaddah) is that it does not ostensibly present itself to us as heresy, and thus, many of us do not see it as such, but to see it as such is to revive the kalm jadd of the Ghazlian Tahfut, the Fakhrurzan Malib, the Taftaznan Maqid, and the jan Mawqif. Failing to do so may not necessarily render us formal neo-Dahris (selfconscious believers in secular progress, historical relativism, and natural and social Darwinism), but nevertheless, we will be neo-Dahris in practice because the neo-Dahrist disciplines we imbibe in the universities present themselves to us as value-neutral objective data, facts, statistics, methods and truths, and we are gullible enough to accept that presentation, lock, stock and barrel. In brief, the heresy of the age demands a Kalm of the Age to expose its true face to all thinking Muslims who care about reviving the wisdom of Tradition, reorientating themselves to Transcendence, and reorganising their personal, communal and civilisational life on the belief in the ultimate life to come; for our identity consists in our service to Transcendence, and not to some fanciful sciencefictional, techno-futuristic Utopia136 or to the nation-state.137 Therefore, it is of the outmost imperative that we not only master completely the Worldview of Islam, 138 but also master completely the various specific contemporary civilisational contexts in which it is to be made operational, 139 for the Worldview of Islam must not only inform, it must also transformi.e., we should be able to create for ourselves a world in which that Worldview can find its home and belong and flourish. We simply have to revive
134

135

136 137

138

139

Literally temporalism, temporalists, referring to the beliefs of the materialists and atheists who belief in the eternity of the world; see the article Dahriyya, in http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/ei2/dahriyya.htm, which includes useful references; alluded to in the Quran, al-Jthiyah: 24, And they have said, This is nothing but our life in the world; we die and we live, and nothing annihilates us but the passage of time (dahr). But they have no knowledge of that; they are only conjecturing. Richard W. Bulliet, The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). H. B. Franklin, ed., Future Perfect (Rutgers University Press, 1995). On this, see al-Attas, Prolegomena, especially the Introduction and the first chapter. It should also be mentioned that the Tahafut was also a positive critique and reconstructive, hence for it is more than likely that doing the tahafut today will open up our eyes to positive, viable alternatives already current which we have so far remained oblivious of due to the tunnel vision way of seeing we have been accustomed to in the secular academia. Once we go on to the tahafut mode of thinking, the practical transformative re-direction will be pretty drastic. Al-Attas, Prolegomena; idem, Islam & Secularism (Kuala Lumpur: ISTAC, 1993); and idem, The Concept of Education in Islam (Kuala Lumpur: ISTAC, 1991). See also Wan Mohd Nor, The Educational Philosophy. On this, see Chapter 5 of al-Attas, Islam and Secularism.

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and implement the Ghazlan intellectual approach of the Maqid and the Tahfut for the addressing and overcoming the challenges of the current era, which is essentially The Challenge of Knowledge. Professor al-Attas has explained the nature of this challenge in very fank, candid and direct terms: I venture to maintain that the greatest challenge that has surreptitiously arisen in our age is the challenge of knowledge, indeed, not as against ignorance; but knowledge as conceived and disseminated throughout the world by Western civilization; knowledge whose nature has become problematic because it has lost its true purpose due to being unjustly conceived, and has thus brought about chaos in mans life instead of, and rather than, peace and justice; knowledge which pretends to be real but which is productive of confusion and scepticism, which has elevated doubt and conjecture to the scientific rank in methodology and which regards doubt as an eminently valid epistemological tool in the pursuit of truth; knowledge which has, for the first time in history, brought chaos to the Three Kingdoms of Nature: the animal, vegetal and mineral. It seems to me important to emphasize that knowledge is not neutral, and can indeed, be infused with a nature and content which masquerade as knowledge. Yet, it is, in fact, taken as a whole, not true knowledge, but its interpretation through the prism, as it were, the worldview, the intellectual vision and psychological perception of the civilisation that now plays the key role in its formulation and dissemination. What is formulated and disseminated is knowledge infused with the character and personality of that civilisationknowledge as presented and conveyed as knowledge in that guise so subtly fused together with the real so that others take it unawares in toto to be the real knowledge per se.140 This rigorous re-articulation of the Worldview of Islam will be the new dialectics, the Dialectics of the Age (kalm al-ar). It is hoped that through these well-grounded efforts in collaboration with like-minded scholars, intellectuals and institutions, Muslim and non-Muslim, and with the guidance of our independent, community-rooted teachers and shuykh, the Worldview of Islam will once again find public expression as a world culture and civilisation to which it belongs and blossoms and finds its home and thereby contribute to the universal revival of a heart-felt consciousness of the Transcendent in human life and society. 9. Kalm al-Ar, Islamization, and the Comprehensive Critical Mapping of the Modern Sciences
140

Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, The De-Westernization of Knowledge, with foreword by Claude Alvares (Penang: Citizens International, 2009), 1112. See also al-Attas, Islam and Secularism, 133134.

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Al-Attas defines and elaborates the term islamization as follows: Islamization is the liberation of man first from mythological, magical, animistic, natural-cultural tradition opposed to Islam, and then from secular control over his reason and his language. The man of Islam is he whose reason and language are no longer controlled by magic, mythology, animism, his owm national and cultural traditions opposed to Islam, and secularism. He is liberated from both the magical and secular world views.since man is both physical being and spirit, the liberation refers to his spirit, for man as such is the real man to whom all conscious and significant actions ultimately refer. The liberation of his spirit or soul bears direct influence upon his physical being or body in that it brings about peace and harmony within himself in his manifestation as a human being, and also between him as such and nature. He has, in liberation in this sense, set his course towards attainment to his original state, which is in harmony with the state of all being and existence (i.e. firah).141 In the present context of liberating ourselves from the suffocating intellectual and cultural hegemony of the West and its secularising impact on us, this project of true Islamization entails Dewesternisation. As a matter of fact, al-Attas has said to the effect that dewesternisation is a condition of Islamization: In appraising the situation with regard to the formulation and dissemination of knowledge in the Muslim world, we must see that the infiltration of key concepts from the Western world has brought confusion which will ultimately cause grave consequences if left unchecked. Since what is formulated and disseminated in and through universities and other institutions of learning from the lower to the higher levels is in fact knowledge infused with the character and personality of Western culture and civilization and moulded in the crucible of Western culture . . . , our task will be first to isolate the elements including the key concepts which make up that culture and civilization. These elements and key concepts are mainly prevalent in that branch of knowledge pertaining to the human sciences, although it must be noted that even in the natural, physical and applied sciences, particularly where they deal with interpretations of facts and formulation of theories, the same process of isolation of the elements and key concepts should be applied; for the interpretations and formulations indeed belong to the sphere of the human sciences. The islamization of present-day knowledge means precisely that, after the isolation process referred to, the knowledge free of the elements and key concepts isolated are then infused with the Islamic elements and key concepts which,
141

Islam and Secularism, 4445.

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in view of their fundamental nature as defining the firah, in fact imbue the knowledge with the quality of its natural function and purpose and thus makes it true knowledge. It will not do to accept present-day knowledge as it is, and then hope to Islamize it merely by grafting or transplanting into it Islamic sciences and principles; this method will but produce conflicting results not altogether beneficial nor desirable. Neither grafting nor transplant can produce the desired result when the body is already possessed by foreign elements consumed in the disease. The foreign elements and disease will have first to be drawn out and neutralized before the body of knowledge can be remoulded in the crucible of Islam.142 Quite apart from the ongoing foundational work of conceptual engagement and explication outlined above by al-Attas, one practical outcome of the Kalm of the Age approach will be to design a two-part certificate or diploma course on the Worldview of Islam covering both its pure (i.e., conceptual = mafhmi) and applied (operational = maml, amali) dimensions, with a view to helping students or participants engage creatively and closely with both tradition and modernity in a manner which will enable them to bring the tradition to bear critically, evaluatively and constructively on the sciences of the modern academia, and thereby, differentiating between objective truths and subjective fictions, 143 and separating the beneficial from the harmful of those sciences, or separating the beneficial from the harmful aspects of each of those sciences, especially those sciences having general axiological warrant144 from within the perspective of tradition and local culture. Scholars and students alike are invited to implement an educational and research programme toward operationalising Nuh Ha Mims important and urgent call to scientifically literate Muslims today to clarify the provisional nature of the logic of science, and to show how its epistemology, values, and
142 143

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Al-Attas, Islam and Secularism, 162163. Mauricio Suarez, ed., Fictions in Science: Philosophical Essays on Modeling and Idealization (London: Routledge, 2008). I thank my friend Dr. Sachi Arafat of Glasgow University for drawing my attention to this interesting and important book. See also Camille Limoges, Simon Schwartzman et al., The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage, 1994). Cf. Brian Martin, The Bias of Science (Canberra: Society for Social Responsibility in Science, 1979); Karin Knorr Cetina, The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1981); and idem, Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). For cases in point of scientific fraud, see Horace Freeland Judson, The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science (Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Books, 2004); and Marcel C. LaFolette, Stealing into Print: Fraud, Plagiarism and Misconduct in Scientific Publishing (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996). See also the small book by Alan Chalmers, Science and Its Fabrication (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990); and also Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). See, for instance, Archie J. Bahm, Axiology: The Science of Values (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1993), and its useful bibliography on various aspects of the subject.

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historical and cultural moment condition the very nature of questions it can askor answer.145 And we should systematically build the intellectual and institutional capacity to apply this deconstructive-reconstructive approach to sciences such as medicine, agriculture, economics, biology, physics, chemistry, engineering and other important disciplines of the modern academia impacting on Muslim intellectual, cultural, social and economic life. Operationally, the Worldview of Islam Course (WIC) or Worldview of Islam Intellectual Series (WISE)146 shall be offered at two levels. One level is for high school or pre-university matriculation students before they enrol in the modern academia for formal studies of the various modern disciplines. Another level is that which targets high school teachers and university lecturers, including postgraduate researchers, working professionals, educational policy-makers and curriculum-developers, who teach and/or design the courses in any of the modern disciplines, from preschool to tertiary levels of education. These two levels are conceptually connected but with different immediate pragmatic objectives. The objective of the first level or WISE Level I is to provide pre-university students with a critical survey or mapping of the numerous, diverse disciplines on offer in the modern academia. The mapping can equip the students in a way that will enable them to stand back, reflect and consider carefully the intellectual and career direction they are about to undertake, and its long-term implications for their belief and value system as Muslims who are self-conscious about their worldview, and about their duty to their local communities and to the larger cosmopolitan society in which their communities may be embedded, whether in the East or West. This mapping, as a generative guide to creative reflection and thoughtful deliberation, will help soon-to-be university students to be more discriminative in the course of choosing their fields of study and their majors; to be very selective in their choice of universities, faculties or departments to enrol in; and even to be very particular about their choice of professors, lecturers and academic supervisors, insofar as they are able or allowed to exercise that choice. By means of this critical mappingwhich itself is deeply rooted in and inspired by the classical Islamic classification of the sciences147 it is hoped that students will be able to opt for disciplines and decide on career paths that are truly beneficial rather than harmful, meaningful rather than frivolous or superfluous, and that are geared toward meeting some real social, cultural, intellectual or economic needs of their communities, rather than serving narrow corporate greed, nihilistic economic growth or disembedded material development, or even aimless idle curiosity. For instance, by means of this critical

145 146

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Keller, Kalam and Islam, 25. Title and acronym proposed by Dr. Mohd Zaidi Ismail of IKIM, and accepted by the management of the course. Osman Bakr, Classification of Knowledge in Islam: A Study in Islamic Philosophies of Science (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1998).

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mapping one may want to opt for green chemistry148 rather than conventional chemistry, natural medicine 149 or naturopathy over conventional allopathic medicine, cognitive psychology 150 over behaviourial psychology, ecological and steady-state economics151 over neoliberal capitalism, organic or permaculture 152 over chemical intensive agriculture, biomimicry 153 over biotechnology, 154 appropriate technology155 over high technology, and so on and so forth. Such choices are arguably more in accord with the Islamic axiological principles of not harming (l arara wa l irara), beneficial knowledge (ilm nfi) and compassion (ramah). Along the way, one is also to be guided by means of this critical mapping toward unravelling the ideological, methodological, philosophical and metaphysical assumptions underpinning those disciplines and the often hidden, murky parochial background of their original development in post-Enlightenment socio-intellectual history, or even in the relatively recent post-World War II geopolitical restructuring and readjustment leading to the current world-system.156 The objective of the second level or WISE Level II is to help working professionals, researchers and policy-makers to transform both the content and the method of what they are presently doing so that these will eventually be brought into axiological accord with the Worldview of Islam. For instance, as a result of this critical mapping, a Muslim researcher in physics can be more critically aware of the ontic and epistemic limits of the laws of physics,157 and he
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149

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151 152

153

154

155

156

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Including related areas such as green engineering and green technology; see, for instance, Paul T. Anastas and John C. Warner, Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Leon Chaitow et al., Naturopathic Physical Medicine: Theory and Practice for Manual Therapists and Naturopaths (Philadelphia: Elsevier, 2008). Cognitive psychology is on the whole arguably more in accord with traditional Islamic faculty psychology; see Syed Muhammad Naqib al-Attas, The Nature of Man and the Psychology of the Human Soul: A Brief Outline and a Framework for an Islamic Psychology and Epistemology (Kuala Lumpur: ISTAC, 1990); cf. for instance, Ray Jackendoff, Patterns in the Mind: Language and Human Nature (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993); and Noam Chomsky, Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1987). Cf. also Karl Popper and John C. Eccles, The Self and Its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism (London: Routledge, 2003); John C. Eccles, The Human Psyche: The Gifford Lectures (London: Routledge, 1992); Karl R. Popper, Knowledge and the Body-Mind Problem: In Defence of Interaction (London: Routledge, 1994); and Mario Beauregard and Denyse OLeary , The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientists Case for the Existence of the Soul (New York: Harper One, 2007). Herman Daly, Steady-State Economics, 2d edition (Washington, DC.: Island Press, 1991). Bill C. Mollison, Permaculture: A Designers Manual (Sisters Creek, Tasmania: Tagari Publications, 1988). Janine M. Benyus, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (New York: William Morrow, 1997). On the dangers of biotechnology, see Brian Tokar, ed., Redesigning Life?: The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering (London: Zed Books, 2001). Barrett Hazeltine and Christopher Bull, eds., Field Guide to Appropriate Technology (New York: Academic Press, 2003). See, for instance, Christopher Chase-Dunn, World-Systems Theorizing, in Jonathan Turner, ed., Handbook of Sociological Theory (New York: Plenum, 2001). Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); idem, A Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

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may thereby opt for the Bohmian ontological interpretation of quantum mechanics over the mainstream Copenhagen instrumentalist interpretation158; an education policy-maker may want to make a course in ecology a prerequisite to an economics programme or even embed economics altogether into ecology and/or sociology, thereby redefining economics and creating what can be termed an ecologics of economics. 159 Similarly, a biology school teacher may want to transform his biology course into a true science of life by putting the bio back into biology through the phenomenological approach to the study of nature by opting, inter alia, for the class to study, say, actual living frogs by a pond embedded in the woods, rather than chloroformed or tortured, dead, dissected frogs pinned to a cold lab bench, thoroughly disembedded from any real, living ecosystemic contexts of the natural world.160 As the Nature Institute puts it: Many of us were introduced to biologythe science of lifeby dissecting frogs, and we never learned anything about living frogs in nature. Modern biology has increasingly moved out of nature and into the laboratory, driven by a desire to find an underlying mechanistic basis of life. Despite all its success, this approach is one-sided and urgently calls for a counterbalancing movement toward nature. Only if we find ways of transforming our propensity to reduce the world to parts and mechanisms, will we be able to see, value, and protect the integrity of nature and the interconnectedness of all things. This demands a new way of seeing.161 This phenomenological approach to science and the study of nature is obviously way much more in accord with the Islamic conception of nature as exhibiting the signs of God (ytuLlh);162 and as ytuLlh they all celebrate, with the tongues of their existential states (lisn al-l), the praises of their Lord: wa in min shayin ill yusabbiu bi amdihAnd there is not a thing but hymns His praise.163 The Kalm/Dialectics of the Age approach discussed above may be schematised in the form of three concentric circles as follows:

158

159

160

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162

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David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge, 1980); idem and B. J. Hiley, The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory (London: Routledge, 2002). Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley, Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2004). Erin Radelfinger, Dissecting Dissection: A Resource Handbook for High School Biology Educators, accessible online at http://www.scoe.org/files/dissection.pdf. http://natureinstitute.org/nature/index.htm. See also Thom Henly and Kenny Peavy, As If the Earth Matters: Recommitting to Environmental Education (2006). Annamarie Schimmel, Deciphering the Signs of God: A Phenomenological Approach to Islam (New York: SUNY, 1994); and Adi Setia, Taskhr, Fine-Tuning, Intelligent Design and the Scientific Appreciation of Nature, in Islam & Science (Summer, 2004), 732. al-Isr: 44.

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The inner circle represents the unchanging, permanent metaphysical core expressed as the Worldview of Islam (ruyat al-Islm li al-wujd).164 The middle circle represents the network of auxiliary conceptual constructs, theories and hypotheses, which may be modified, changed or added to from time to time and may be called the network of auxiliary theories (shabakah al-naariyyt almulaqah). This middle circle effectively represents the creative, critical yet selfcritical kalm or dialectics of the age. The outer circle represents nature ( altabah), the physical, sensible world itself, or simply, the physical world, which may also be extended to include the human, socio-cultural world insofar as it is inextricably embedded in the larger natural world. The challenge of Islamic scientific creativity today lies squarely in the middle circle and consists in the intellectual work of articulating objective conceptual and theoretical frameworks for bringing the worldview of tradition to bear evaluatively, in both the cognitive and ethical sense, on our engagement with and understanding of the natural and cultural world, especially the cultural world which is now so overwhelmingly under the sway of a secularising, nihilistic mode of thinking and doing systemically imparted to both Muslims and non-Muslims alike through the various disciplines of the modern academia. 165 By objective is meant that this dialectics is to be also amenable to participation and scrutiny by non-Muslim thinkers, philosophers and scientists, if they so wish, even if they do not believe or are not committed to the metaphysical core (i.e., the Worldview of Islam), by common reference to the very same

164 165

Al-Attas, Prolegomena, 2. Further elaboration in Adi Setia, Three Meanings of Islamic Science: Toward Operationalizing Islamization of Science, Islam & Science 5, no. 1 (Summer 2007): 2353. See also idem, Some Upstream Research Programs for Muslim Mathematicians: Operationalizing Islamic Values in the Sciences through Mathematical Creativity, Islam & Science 6, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 153196; and idem, Islamic Science as a Scientific Research Program: Conceptual and Pragmatic Issues, in Islam & Science (Summer 2005), 93101.

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physical and social world observationally and experientially accessible to both Muslims and non-Muslims alike and in which they are both embedded. It is by virtue of this objectivity that Muslim scientists involved in the new dialectics will have no problem recognising certain positive elements of Western and Eastern sciences and incorporating their insights into both their intellectual and practical work. For example, modern permaculture and organic farming can be easily assimilated into classical Islamic filah (science of agriculture and animal husbandry),166 thereby reviving it to play a meaningful and beneficial role in the current world-wide movement for returning to and reviving natural farming without the use of chemicals, pesticides, synthetic fertilizers and genetic engineering. To underline this important point about objectivity, it is worth mentioning the recent 72-hour Permaculture Design Certificate course on the science, art and practice of permaculture and sustainable living that was recently organised by Murujan Permaculture in Kuang, Selangor, Malaysia. Most of the nearly twenty participants from Malaysia and elsewhere were Muslims but the three non-Muslims participants (from Australia, Poland and Singapore) also found the course to be very useful and beneficial to them.167 Another case in point is the recent 5-day Christian-Muslim Interfaith Dialogue on Structural Greed organised by the Lutheran World Federation in which the roughly fifty participants, Muslim and Christians from Malaysia, Indonesia, Germany, England, United States, Peru and other countries, succeeded in converging, on the very first day itself, on redefining economics with respect to its ends as the science of the organization of livelihood for the common good, and in the process they all agreed to do away with the conventional obsessive concern with the idea of scarcity and growth.168 Although further elaboration is needed on the creative nature of the dialectical middle circle, which is basically where the discursive reason (fikr/naar) and contemplative intellect (aql/wijdn) mediate between the book of revelation and the book of creation, a simple general example may here suffice to give some degree of insight into what this creativity entails in operative terms. The Qurn says that the Prophet was sent by the Creator as a mercy to all the worlds (ramatan lil-lamn). 169 If we, as scientists, are to follow in the footsteps of the merciful Prophet, then the way we study nature and interact with it (mumalatu al-nsi al-tabata) is constrained by the prophetic ethics of cosmic mercy. 170 This means that much of what we do or take for granted in contemporary science and technology has to be seriously and systemically
166 167

168

169 170

http://www.filaha.org/ A review of the course is on the website: http://murujan.com/2012/03/19/permaculture-designcourse-review/. The conference findings can be assessed online at http://www.lutheranworld.org/lwf/wpcontent/uploads/2011/10/DTS-KotaKinabalu2011_FinalDoc.pdf. For a detailed report, see Wan Mohd Aimran Wan Mohd Kamil, Aliff Basri and Adi Setia, Engaging Structural Greed Today: A Christian-Muslim Interfaith Dialogue, Report and Reflections, in Adi Setia, trans., The Book of Earning a Livelihood (Kitab al-Kasb of Imm Muammad al-Shaybn), Appendix III, pp. 227288. Quran, al-Anbiy: 107. Umar Faruq Abd Allah, Mercy, the Stamp of Creation, Nawawi Foundation paper (online at www.nawawi.org/downloads/article1.pdf).

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rethought and reconsidered since it is obviously unrestrained by the ethics of mercy. Modern science and its technological offshoots are, in many diverse, complex ways, very aggressive and destructive toward nature and, by extension, toward humankind as part of nature.171 If, by definition, science is the study of nature, then obviously it is in the interest of science to preserve nature in order to guarantee its continued study by science. Thus, scientific curiosity entails moral responsibility. However, the paradox now is that the more science discovers and knows about nature, the more of nature is devastated, and the less there remains of it to be studied and appreciated. It is as if the modern pursuit of abstract, cerebral science and its manipulative technological offshoots have to go hand in hand with the desolation and disappearance of living nature as an unavoidable consequence, but that position is unacceptably fatalistic for truly concerned and reflective Muslim scientists, including non-Muslim scientists like Bill Mollison.172 For them, the Qurnic ethics of universal, cosmic mercy points the way clearly toward another way of doing science, namely, one that respects and preserves nature (and by extension humankind) rather than destroys it, and a wellarticulated kalm dialectics of science involving the active participation of all thinking, reflective and self-critical ulama and scientists (including all sensible people who works closely with nature) will facilitate the task and duty toward realising that science in practice. The following are some specific examples by way of further illustration. Vivisectionmeaning to cut alive hence, the preferred, more polite term, animal testing, or animal experimentation in modern medical academiais the way western, business-driven medicine tortures various species of live animals (rats, mice, rabbits, chimpanzees, dogs, cats) to test drugs in order to rid humanity of their ever-lengthening list of old and new diseases. As a method of medical research (specifically testing drugs for safety and effectiveness), it is relatively new (only a hundred or so years old) and peculiar to modern Western medical culture that is now hopelessly corrupted, cognitively and morally, by crass commercialism and corporatism.173 Quite apart from the extrinsic question of ethical concern for the welfare of lab animals in respect thereof, there is also a more fundamental intrinsic question, namely, the question of the scientific integrity (or cognitive value) of the underlying, largely unexamined assumption of a significant degree of biological, biochemical and physiological parity between

171

172

173

See, for instance, the book by Claude Alvares, Science, Development and Violence: The Revolt against Modernity (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992); and idem, Science, in The Development Dictionary, ed., Wolfgang Sachs (London: Zed Books, 1992), pp. 219 232. Bill Mollison, Permaculture: A Designers Manual (Tagari Publications, 1988), 1112 on Science and the Thousand Names of God. Ray D. Strand, Death by Prescription: The Shocking Truth Behind an Overmedicated Nation (Thomas Nelson, 2003); cf. Marc A. Rodwin, Conflict of Interestes and the Future of Medicine: The United States, France, and Japan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Maggie Mahar, Money-Driven Medicine (Collins, 2006).

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laboratory test animals and human beings justifying extrapolations of laboratory data from the former to the latter.174 The kalm dialectical deconstruction and reconstruction of modern medicine for Muslim medical researchers in this regard will be to find systemic alternatives of unquestioned scientific probity and ethical integrity to vivisection, including valid alternatives critically-sourced from presently marginalised Western (e.g., homeopathy, naturopathy) and eastern medical traditions (e.g., traditional Chinese medicine 175 ) which could be incorporated into a wellarticulated Islamic Medicine Research Program (IMRP). Some of these alternatives can also be gleaned by undertaking evidence-based medical research into the well-documented but largely neglected vast corpus of the very successful one thousand year-old Islamic cosmopolitan medical tradition. Modern agriculture, to take another case in point, is overly chemicalintensive with widespread use of pesticides, herbicides, synthetic nitrogen fertilisers and other toxic inputs, which poison and degrade the soil, kill rural wildlife, even toxify the harvests and disrupt the health of farmers and workers. Traditional farming methods have been perfectly adapted to local socio-natural conditions generating a symbiotic, holistic balance between the needs of humanity and the rights of nature.176 As the word implies, agriculture is a culture, a whole way of life of mutual respect, communal give and take, and cooperative rather than competitive living. Indeed, there are also agro-innovations, but innovations within ecological and cultural limits, as the case of Andalusian agricultural science and practice (ilm al-filah) shows. 177 It is not a mere business, as the modern corruption of the original word into agribusiness would have itmost exemplified perhaps in the infamous case of Monsanto178 which imposes the face-less corporate tyranny of disembedded, impersonal profit174

175

176

177

178

Pietro Croce, Vivisection or Science: An Investigation into Testing Drugs and Safeguarding Health (London: Zed Books, 1999). See also C. Ray Greek and Jean Swingle Greek, Sacred Cows and Golden Geese: The Human Costs of Experiments on Animals (New York: Continuum. 2002); and Ray Greek and Niall Shanks, FAQS about the Use of Animals in Science: A Handbook for the Scientifically Perplexed (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2009). For understanding traditional Chinese medicine, see the sensitive, nuanced and deeply reflective book by Stephen Fulder, The Tao of Medicine: Oriental Remedies and the Pharmacology of Harmony (Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books, 1987). Mae-Wan Ho, Sam Burcher et al., Food Futures Now: Organic, Sustainable, Fossil Fuel Free (Penang: Third World Network, and London: Institute of Science in Society, 2008). Ab Zakariyy Yay ibn Muammad ibn Amad ibn Al-Awwm Al-Ishbil (ca. 12th century), Kitb al-Fila as described in Toufic Fahd, Botany and Agriculture, in Regis Morelon and Roshdi Rashed, Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science (London: Routledge, 1996). See also the website of The Filaha Texts Project: The Arabic Books of Husbandry, http://www.filaha.org/. For filah in the Yemen, see Daniel Martin Varisco, Medieval Agriculture and Islamic Science: The Almanac of a Yemeni Sultan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994). For the case against Monsanto, see Peter Pringle, Food, Inc.: Mendel to Monsanto, The Promises and Perils of the Biotech Harvest (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005); and Marie-Monique Robin, The World According to Monsanto: Pollution, Corruption, and the Control of Our Food Supply, An Investigation into the Worlds Most Controversial Company (New York: New Press, 2010). See also Karl Weber, ed., Food, Inc.: How Industrial Food is Making Us Sicker, Fatter, and Poorer, and What You can Do about It (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), a book companion to the acclaimed and influential film documentary, Food, Inc.

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maximisation on once self-respectful, independent farmers and indigenous peoples, reducing them to wage- and debt-slaves, squatters and refugees on the very lands they once have had ancestral and native customary rights to, but now wrested from them by faceless, soulless corporations which have cleverly lobbied and coopted the political and legal structures of the state into serving their narrow, self-serving agenda. It is strange that agricultural food production, which once unquestionably served the well-being of humankind, should now, in the hands of big transnational agrochemical companies like Monsanto, be seen to be working toward destroying the very ecological and cultural basis of that well-being. In order to return agricultural practice onto the ethical and moral path of compassion and service toward both culture and nature, the kalm dialectics would work toward rearticulating an authentic Islamic Agricultural Research Program (IARP) as one that eschews harmful chemicals altogether, and instead looks into the various effective sustainable organic agricultural methods now available, such as permaculture and natural farming,179 and develop new ones by, for instance, drawing on the thousand years accumulated experience of the very successful Islamic agricultural traditionthe original, truly green revolution in the history of mankind.180 In this respect, the greening the desert181 initiative by the world-renowned permaculturist Geoff Lawton and his partners in Jordan is a great inspiration for us all who care deeply about nurturing a healthy relationship with soil, soul and society.182 10. Worldview of Islam, the Counter-Academia, and the Imperative of Scientific Objectivity Ultimately, all these initiatives toward a constructive counter-academia183 will have to be systemically consolidated under academic and vocational educational structures quite independent of the mainstream educational establishment. The underlying consideration here is that we really want our students and graduates to be able not only to understand the Islamic tradition and the Worldview of Islam, but also to be able have careers and make a decent, respectable and meaningful livelihood for the common good (al-malaah al-mmah) by using their knowledge and training to operationalise the Worldview of Islam in the
179 180

181

182

183

Bill Mollison, Permaculture: A Designers Manual (Tasmania: Sisters Creek, Tagari, 1988) Andrew M. Watson, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques, 7001100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), especially 123138 passim. Please access the information about this wonderful work online at the website, http://permaculture.org.au/project_profiles/middle_east/jordan_valley_permaculture_project. htm Allusion to the book by Alastair McIntosh, Soil and Soul: People Against Corporate Power (London: Aurum Press, 2004). Examples that spring to mind is the Schumacher College in the UK and the networks of permaculture research institutes throughout the world. Another recent and promising initiative in this regard (though as yet not totally independent) is the Center for Advanced Studies on Islam, Science and Civilisation (CASIS), based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, http://www.utm.my/casis/. There are also serious plans in place for establishing the Worldview of Islam Research Academy (WIRA) to be based in the state of Terengganu in Malaysia.

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public, socio-economic domain within the local communities in which they are embedded, hence, for instance, the HAKIM (http://www.hakim.org.my/) initiative in organizing the public educational Worldview of Islam Intellectual Series (WISE) with various partners and supporters, and the Muamalah Research Unit (MRU) at the International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM) for reviving an economics for the common good. While WISE works toward fleshing out in conceptual and pragmatic terms the operational implications of the Worldview of Islam by formulating and offering curricula, syllabi and courses for reviving the arts and sciences of responsible intellectuality and sustainable living in the world, the focus of the MRU is to revive the original meaning and purpose of economics, which we have formally redefined as the science of provisioning and sharing, by mutual giving and receiving, of natural and cultural abundance for realising material and spiritual well-being for the common good, or the science of earning and provisioning for livelihoods, (= ilm al-iktisb wa al-infq) and thereby, put into operation the Islamic Gift Economy (IGE, al-iqtid al-infq) or Common-Good Economics.184 The question of scientific objectivity (i.e., the question of what should count as objectively-verified knowledge and the research methods by which this objectivity is ascertained and attained) has more to do with the cognitive rather than ethical values underpinning the kalm dialectical approach, although in Islamic scientific practice, the cognitive merges seamlessly into the ethical and becomes one with it, hence, the foundational notion of adab as knowledge realised in virtue through tadb (education as discipline of mind, soul and body). 185 In other words, cognitive evaluation and ethical evaluation are both intrinsic to the success of the scientific enterprise in Islam, as is quite evident in, say, Ibn Haythams much studied scientific methodology, which also involved a thoroughgoing kalmic dialectics with Greek physical and optical theories.186 The realisation that scientific objectivity and methodological probity are not possible without concomitant ethico-moral integrity has been growing in the West and is now converging on a position more in accord with that of the Worldview of Islam, thereby allowing much room for mutual constructive engagement on this important meta-scientific issue.187

184

185

186

187

Adi Setia, Waqf and the Revival of the Islamic Gift Economy, in Awqaf Insights 3 (2010): 14 15; idem, Mumala and the Revival of the Islamic Gift Economy, in Islam & Science (Summer 2011), 6788; idem, Reviving an Economics for the Common Good: The Science of Earning in al-Shaybn, al-Ghazl and al-Dimashq, in Islam & Science (Winter 2011), 177184. Al-Attas, The Concept of Education; see also the elaborate and insightful discussion in Wan Mohd Nor, The Educational Philosophy. Muhammad Saud, The Scientific Method of Ibn al-Haytham (Islamabad: Islamic Research Institute, 1990); and A. I. Sabra, The Optics of Ibn al-Haytham (Kuwait: National Council for Culture, 2002). See, for instance, Alvin M. Weinberg, The Axiology of Science: The urgent question of scientific priorities has helped promote a growing concern with value in science, in American Scientist, vol. 58 no. 6 (November-December 1970), 612-617; Brian Martin, Scientific fraud and the power structure of science, Prometheus, vol. 10, no. 1 (June 1992), 83-98.

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To illustrate briefly how the concept of scientific objectivity actually operates in the kalm dialectics with respect to cultivating an intellectually selfcompetent and self-confident critical attitude toward the Western sciences and disciplines, let us consider the twin Qurnic cognitive principles of tabayyun (investigation, scrutiny) and tabarhun (proof, evidence). Due to the global dominance of Western science, Muslim scientists are continuously bombarded with reports of promising new methods, discoveries and techniques in prestigious Western science journals like the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Nature, Science, New Scientist and Scientific American. It will be thoroughly irresponsible of them to take these reports at face value without undertaking their own investigation (tabayyun) into the often hidden, diverse underlying socioeconomic contexts of these reports and ascertaining their empirical adequacy (burhn) and epistemic autonomy (al-istighll al-ilm) from powerful forces geared less toward global scientific enlightenment than narrow political economic and commercial self-enrichment.188 Creative understanding and practice of tabayyun and tabarhun, as exemplified by Ibn Haytham, will help Muslim scientists to separate the wheat from the chaff of Western science and technology and incorporate it into an integrative Islamic Science Research Program (ISRP). For instance, in the case of chemistry, the growing new field of green chemistry189 is something that shows great promise for eliminating the threat of toxic chemicals from the cultural and natural landscape, thus realising the foundational ethico-juridical principle of l arara wa l irara (no harming and no reciprocating harm),190 which is itself derived from the cosmic, prophetic principle of universal mercy. 11. Conclusion: The Question of Viable and Feasible Structures and Strategies As alluded to above, the highly important, strategic question of appropriate higher educational institutional structures needs to be addressed for realising the Islamic Science Research Program (ISRP) 191 over the long term, especially by educating and training postgraduate researchers (including university professors, even) to creatively apply ISRP principles (culled from kalm jadd and contemporary history, philosophy and sociology of science)192 to their respective specializations. Frankly speaking, I harbour grave misgivings as to whether this vision of the ISRP in the framework of the Kalm of the Age can be faithfully and successfully realised from within the current restrictive and compromised pedagogic framework of the modern academia, including the current Islamic University system, which to a large extent, is either overly coopted into the
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189

190 191

192

For the case of modern medicine and the structural conflicts of interest plaguing it, see Marc A. Rodwin, Conflicts of Interest and the Future of Medicine: The United States, France, and Japan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). And related areas such as green technology, green engineering and green architecture (ecobuilding). Which is actually hadith no. 32 in Imm al-Nawaws Forty Hadiths (al-Arban al-Nawawiyyah). Adi Setia, Islamic Science as a Scientific Research Program: Conceptual and Pragmatic Issues, Islam & Science 3, no. 1(Summer 2005): 93101. See idem, Three Meanings, 2352.

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secular agenda of corporate globalization or into the political economic agenda of the over-centralised state, or into both. Under the current difficult circumstances, the way forward may have to take the form of a loose, informal network of autonomous grassroots educational and research initiatives, such as centers, institutes, academies, madrasahs and think-tanks, build up by independent, community-rooted scholar-intellectuals of conscience and vision and their student-supporters who know one another intimately through formal and informal visits, talks, conferences and other avenues of close intellectual and personal interactions toward a common educational and civilisational mission in which the ISRP can be embedded and realised. Some of these grassroots educational initiatives, though small and limited in scope and resources, are already well-established and flourishing in places such as Malaysia, Turkey, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Dubai, Jordan, Yemen, England, Scotland, the United States, South Africa, Indonesia and Canada, some of which I have personally visited to share some of the Worldview ideas outlined in this paper and other papers. I may take the liberty here of mentioning some of these initiatives by name, such as the Solas Foundation (UK), the Center for Islam & Science (Canada), HAKIM (Malaysia), Cambridge Muslim College (UK), CASIS (Malaysia), INSISTS (Indonesia), Andalus Institute (Singapore), Waqf Academy (South Africa) and others, some of which are currently in the early planning stages, such as the Worldview of Islam Research Academy (WIRA) project to be initially based in Tok Jiring, Terrengganu, Malaysia. Eventually, some form of consensus will emerge on common academic and scholarly standards by which a student qualified in, say, the traditional religious sciences from one institute can be recognised and accepted for a course of study in the intellectual, empirical and vocational sciences in another institute dedicated to the programme of Islamizing the disciplines that have to do with earning an honourable and meaningful livelihood in the service of the common good of the communityi.e., the faru kifyah sciences in general. This will of course entail a really, really hard-headed look at how the concept of faru kifyah (communal duty realised for the common good) should actually be made operative in serving the common good rather than remaining for the most part a deceptive feel-good slogan, as is largely the case today. One bad habit we definitely need to overcome is reducing lofty Islamic principles and concepts (e.g., faru kifyah, maqid al-sharah) into verbal fodder for empty sloganeering. As pointed out by S. Nomanul Haq, there is a great need today to revise the way we educate university science students so that they know how to integrate their scientific learning and expertise into the more fundamental and higher goals of human life, and thus, avoid altogether the destructive, suicidal pitfalls of scientism. 193 True science is beneficial knowledge (al-ilm al-nfi) resulting in wholesome livelihoods (al-kasb al- ayyib) and virtous works (al-aml al-liah) that are geared toward serving rather than subverting these higher, human goals. The highest goal, the summum bonum, is, of course, to bring a sound conscience
193

Syed Nomanul Haq, Science, Scientism and the Liberal Arts, Islam & Science 1, no. 2 (December 2003), 267271.

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(qalbin salm) to the meeting with the Lord,194 and thereby, to attain His pleasure (martiLlh). We may now finally wrap up all these intertwined considerations and reflections with these wise and perceptive words of counsel from Professor Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas: What we need, then, is not a reconstruction, but a restatement of the statements and conclusions of Islamic metaphysics in accordance with the intellectual perspectives of our times and the developments in the domain of knowledge; and this entails an realignment, where relevant and necessary, of the direction of developments in the various sciences such that they become integrated with it.195 In another place, he says: We must learn from the great of the past their knowledge and wisdom. This does not mean that we ourselves cannot contribute any further knowledge that can be contributed, but it does mean that we must first draw our strength [and] inspiration from their wisdom and knowledge, and that when we do begin to contribute ours, we must recognize and acknowledge them as our teachers. and not disparage and denounce, for ijtihad can be exercised without having to undermine legitimate authority. They are like torches that light the way along difficult paths; when we have such torches to light our way, of what use are mere candles?196 In short, we all have to learn again how to stand firmly on the shoulders of giants, and reapply their insight, vison and wisdom to engaging the difficult situation of our age, dispelling its darkness and shadows, and finding the liberating light at the end of the long, winding tunnel. WaLlhu alam.

yahdiLlhu li nrih man yashu

ALLH GUIDES TO HIS LIGHT WHOMEVER HE WILLS197

194 195

196 197

Al-Shuar (26): 89. ujjat al-iddq, 465. In a similar vein, Maulana Ashraf Ali al-Thanvi (18631934), in his alIntibahat al-Mufeedah, translated by Muhammad Hassan Askari and Karrar Husain as Answer to Modernism, 2nd ed. (Karachi: Maktaba Darul-Uloom), has pointed to the fact that this intellectual engagement would require an elaborate reapplication of the sufficient and comprehensive principles of traditional ilm kalm (dialectical theology) to answering the challenge of modern science and philosophy (on pp. 1 5). Islam and Secularism, 132. Qurn, al-Nr: 35.

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Principal References and Recommended Readings198

Al-Akiti, Afifi. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Falsafa: Al-Ghazls Mann, Tahfut, and Maqid, with Particular Attention to their Falsafi Treatments of Gods Knowledge of Temporal Events, in Y. Tzvi Langermann, ed., Avicenna and His Legacy: A Golden Age of Science and Philosophy (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009), pp. 51100. __________and Hisham Hellyer, The Negotiation of Modernity through Tradition in Contemporary Muslim Intellectual Discourse: The NeoGhazalian, Attasian Perspective, in Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud & Muhammad Zaini Uthman, eds., Knowledge, Language, Thought & the Civilization of Islam: Essays in Honor of Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas (Kuala Lumpur: UTM, 2010), pp. 119134. Al-Attas, Syed Muhammad Naquib. Islam and Secularism (Kuala Lumpur: ISTAC, 1993). __________Prolegomena to the Metaphysics of Islam: An Exposition of the Fundamental Elements of the Worldview of Islam (Kuala Lumpur: ISTAC, 2001). __________The Concept of Education in Islam: A Framework for an Islamic Philosophy of Education (Kuala Lumpur: ISTAC, 1991). Alvares, Claude and Shad Saleem Faruqi, Decolonising the University: The Emerging Quest for Non-Eurocentric Paradigms (Penang: USM, 2012). Bakar, Osman. Classification of Knowledge in Islam: A Study in Islamic Philosophies of Science (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1998). Al-Ghazl, Ab amd Muammad. Tahfut al-Falsifah, trans. Michael Marmura, The Incoherence of the Philosophers (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 2000). __________ Kitb al-Ilm, trans. Nabih Amin Faris, The Book of Knowledge (New Delhi: Idara, 2008). Kalin, Ibrahim. Reason and Rationality in the Quran (Amman: Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute, 2012).

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Lest the average, interested reader feels overwhelmed by the many academic and popular references cited in the copious footnotes to this paper, what follows is a hopefully more manageable guide to what I believe are some of the more accessible principal readings in English pertaining to the papers thesis that they can peruse at a steady yet leisurely pace over the course of a month or so, in sh Allh.

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Keller, Nuh Ha Mim, Kalam and Islam: Traditional Theology and the Future of Islam, Islamica, no. 13 (Summer 2005), pp. 1527. Latouche, Serge. The Westernization of the World: The Significance, Scope and Limits of the Drive towards Global Uniformity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996). Sabra, A. I. The Appropriation and Subsequent Naturalization of Greek Science in Medieval Islam: A Preliminary Statement, History of Science, 25 (1987), pp. 22342. __________Science and Philosophy in Medieval Islamic Theology: The Evidence of the Fourteentn Century, Zeitschrift fur Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften, 9 (1994), pp. 142. __________Kalm Atomism as an Alternative to Hellenizing Falsafa, in James E. Montgomery, ed., Arabic Theology, Arabic Philosophy, from the Many to the One: Essays in Celebration of Richard M. Frank (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), pp. 199272. Saliba, George. Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). Shihadeh, Ayman. From al-Ghazl to al-Rz: 6th/12th Century Developments in Muslim Philosophical Theology, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, vol. 15 (2005), pp. 141179. Setia, Adi. Three Meanings of Islamic Science: Toward Operationalizing the Islamization of Science, Islam & Science, 3 (2007), pp. 2352. __________The Philosophy of Science of Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas: An Extended Outline, Islam & Science, 1 (2003), pp. 165214. __________Taskhr, Fine-Tuning, Intelligent Design & the Appreciation of Nature, Islam & Science, 2 (2004). pp. 732. Scientific

Wan Daud, Wan Mohd Nor. The Educational Philosophy and Practice of Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas: An Exposition of the Original Conception of Islamization (Kuala Lumpur; ISTAC, 1998). __________Dewesternization and Islamization: Their Epistemic Framework and Final Purpose, in Noritah Omar, Washima Che Dan et al., eds., Critical Perspectives on Literature and Culture in the New World Order (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 225.

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